DBMS > Cassandra vs. RDF4J vs. Sphinx vs. Teradata Aster vs. TiDB

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. RDF4J vs. Sphinx vs. Teradata Aster vs. TiDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

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

RDF4J is a Java framework for processing RDF data, supporting both memory-based and a disk-based storage.

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

Platform for big data analytics on multistructured data sources and types

TiDB is an open source distributed SQL database that supports Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) workloads. It is MySQL compatible and features horizontal scalability, strong consistency, and high availability.

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Document store

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

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	0.69
Rank	#230	Overall
	#9	RDF stores

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	4.66
Rank	#70	Overall
	#38	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

rdf4j.org/documentation

sphinxsearch.com/docs

docs.pingcap.com/tidb/stable

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Since 2016 officially forked into an Eclipse project, former developer was Aduna Software.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Teradata

PingCAP, Inc.

Initial release

2008

2004

2001

2005

2016

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

3.5.1, February 2023

8.0.0, March 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Eclipse Distribution License (EDL), v1.0.

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

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.

TiDB Cloud: Fully-managed TiDB Service. Bring everything great about TiDB to the cloud.

Implementation language

Java

C++

Go, Rust

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

RDF Schemas

yes

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

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

in Aster File Store

Secondary indexes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

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 (SphinxQL)

yes

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

Java API
RIO

RDF Input/Output
Sail API
SeRQL

Sesame RDF Query Language
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL

Proprietary protocol

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB

GORM
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
SQLAlchemy

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java
PHP
Python

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

C
C#
C++
Java
Python
R

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

R packages

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

none

Sharding

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

Sharding

horizontal partitioning (by key range)

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

none

yes

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

Using Raft consensus algorithm to ensure data replication with strong consistency among multiple replicas.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

SQL Map-Reduce Framework

yes

with TiSpark Connector

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

full support since version 6.6

Transaction concepts

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

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID

Isolation support depends on the API used

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

in-memory storage is supported as well

yes

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

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

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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TiDB is an advanced open-source, distributed SQL database for modern application...
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Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
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- HORIZONTAL SCALING : TiDB grants total transparency into your data workloads without...
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Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
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TiDB is ideal for transactional applications that require extreme scalability and...
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Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
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Block, Pinterest, Catalyst, Bolt, Flipkart, Capcom, Shopee (E-commerce), JD Cloud...
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Market metrics

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

34K+ GitHub stars 5K+ members in TiDB Community Slack 1K+ community contributors...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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TiDB Community : Free open source software (Apache 2.0) TiDB Self-Hosted : Enterprise...
» more

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