DBMS > Cassandra vs. Kdb vs. Sphinx vs. Titan

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Kdb vs. Sphinx vs. Titan

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Titan has been decommisioned after the takeover by Datastax. It will be removed from the DB-Engines ranking. A fork has been open-sourced as JanusGraph.

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

High performance Time Series DBMS

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Titan is a Graph DBMS optimized for distributed clusters.

Primary database model

Wide column store

Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Search engine

Graph DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Relational DBMS

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

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	7.55
Rank	#53	Overall
	#3	Time Series DBMS
	#1	Vector DBMS

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

cassandra.apache.org

kx.com

sphinxsearch.com

github.com/thinkaurelius/titan

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

code.kx.com

sphinxsearch.com/docs

github.com/thinkaurelius/titan/wiki

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Kx Systems, a division of First Derivatives plc

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Aurelius, owned by DataStax

Initial release

2008

2000

kdb was released 2000, kdb+ in 2003

2001

2012

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

3.6, May 2018

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

free 32-bit version

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

Apache license, version 2.0

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++

Java

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

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

Secondary indexes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

table attribute 'grouped'

yes

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

SQL-like query language (q)

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

HTTP API
JDBC
Jupyter
Kafka
ODBC
WebSocket

Proprietary protocol

Java API
TinkerPop Blueprints
TinkerPop Frames
TinkerPop Gremlin
TinkerPop Rexster

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C
C#
C++
Go
J
Java
JavaScript
Lua
MatLab
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Scala

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Clojure
Java
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

yes

Triggers

yes

with views

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

horizontal partitioning

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

yes

via pluggable storage backends

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Source-replica replication

none

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

similar paradigm used for internal processing

yes

via Faunus, a graph analytics engine

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graph

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

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

yes

Supports various storage backends: Cassandra, HBase, Berkeley DB, Akiban, Hazelcast

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

rights management via user accounts

User authentification and security via Rexster Graph Server

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
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Integrated columnar database & programming system for streaming, real time and historical...
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Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
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provides seamless scalability; runs on industry standard server platforms; is top-ranked...
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Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
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tick database streaming sensor data massive intelligence applications oil and gas...
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Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
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Goldman Sachs Morgan Stanley Merrill Lynch J.P. Morgan Deutsche Bank IEX Securities...
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Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
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kdb+ performance and reliability proven by our customers in critical infrastructure...
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Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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upon request
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and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.