DBMS > Cassandra vs. LevelDB vs. Postgres-XL vs. searchxml vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. LevelDB vs. Postgres-XL vs. searchxml vs. TimescaleDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Embeddable fast key-value storage library that provides an ordered mapping from string keys to string values

Based on PostgreSQL enhanced with MPP and write-scale-out cluster features

DBMS for structured and unstructured content wrapped with an application server

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Wide column store

Key-value store

Relational DBMS

Native XML DBMS
Search engine

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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	2.35
Rank	#111	Overall
	#19	Key-value stores

Score	0.49
Rank	#256	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#7	Native XML DBMS
	#25	Search engines

Score	4.64
Rank	#71	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

github.com/google/leveldb

www.postgres-xl.org

www.searchxml.net/category/products

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

github.com/google/leveldb/blob/main/doc/index.md

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

www.searchxml.net/support/handouts

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Google

informationpartners gmbh

Timescale

Initial release

2008

2011

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

2015

2017

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

1.23, February 2021

10 R1, October 2018

1.0

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

BSD

Open Source

Mozilla public license

commercial

Open Source

Apache 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++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Illumos
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
macOS

Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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

XML type, but no XML query functionality

yes

Secondary indexes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

RESTful HTTP API
WebDAV
XQuery
XSLT

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C++
Go
Java

3rd party binding
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party binding
Python

3rd party binding

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Erlang
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

C++

most other programming languages supported via APIs

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

yes

on the application server

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

none

horizontal partitioning

none

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

none

yes

sychronisation to multiple collections

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Immediate 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

MVCC

multiple readers, single writer

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

with automatic compression on writes

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Domain, group and role-based access control at the document level and for application services

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
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Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
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Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
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Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
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Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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