DBMS > Cassandra vs. IRONdb vs. Teradata Aster vs. TerminusDB vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. IRONdb vs. Teradata Aster vs. TerminusDB vs. Weaviate

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

IRONdb seems to be discontinued. Therefore it is excluded from the DB-Engines Ranking.

Teradata Aster has been integrated into other Teradata systems and therefore will be removed from the DB-Engines ranking.

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

A distributed Time Series DBMS with a focus on scalability, fault tolerance and operational simplicity

Platform for big data analytics on multistructured data sources and types

Scalable Graph Database platform making enterprise data available by exploiting inferred entities and relationships

An AI-native realtime vector database engine that integrates scalable machine learning models.

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Document store
RDF store

DB-Engines Ranking measures the popularity of database management systems
Trend Chart

Score	98.83
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	0.23
Rank	#316	Overall
	#27	Graph DBMS

Score	1.52
Rank	#153	Overall
	#6	Vector DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.circonus.com/solutions/time-series-database/

terminusdb.com

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

docs.circonus.com/irondb/category/getting-started

terminusdb.github.io/terminusdb/#

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Circonus LLC.

Teradata

DataChemist Ltd.

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2008

2017

2005

2018

2019

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

V0.10.20, January 2018

11.0.0, January 2023

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

GPL V3

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate Enterprise

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Astra DB: Multi-cloud DBaaS built on Apache Cassandra.

Implementation language

Java

C and C++

Prolog, Rust

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

Flexible Schema (defined schema, partial schema, schema free)

defined schema within the relational store; partial schema or schema free in the Aster File Store

yes

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

text, numeric, histograms

yes

string, int, float, geo point, date, cross reference, fuzzy references

XML support

Some form of processing data in XML format, e.g. support for XML data structures, and/or support for XPath, XQuery or XSLT.

yes

in Aster File Store

Secondary indexes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

all data objects are indexed in a semantic vector space (the Contextionary), all primitive fields are indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like SELECT, DML and DDL statements (CQL)

SQL-like query language (Circonus Analytics Query Language: CAQL)

yes

SQL-like query language (WOQL)

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

CQL (Cassandra Query Language, an SQL-like language)
Thrift

HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB

OWL
RESTful HTTP API
WOQL (Web Object Query Language)

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
C
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lisp
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Rust
Scala

C
C#
C++
Java
Python
R

JavaScript
Python

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes, in Lua

R packages

yes

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Automatic, metric affinity per node

Sharding

Graph Partitioning

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

configurable replication factor, datacenter aware

yes

Dimension tables are replicated across all nodes in the cluster. The number of replicas for the file store can be configured.

Journaling Streams

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

SQL Map-Reduce Framework

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Immediate consistency per node, eventual consistency across nodes

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

in-memory journaling

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Role-based access control

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
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Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
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Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
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Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
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Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
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As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
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Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
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All companies that have data.
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Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
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As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
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Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
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