Getting Up and Running with Cassandra - Learning Apache Cassandra - page 13

Comparing Cassandra to the alternatives

Now that you've got an in-depth understanding of the feature set that Cassandra offers, it's
time to figure out which features are most important to you, and which database is the best
fit. The following table lists a handful of commonly used databases, and key features that
they do or don't have:

Feature Cassandra PostgreSQL MongoDB Redis Riak

Structured records Yes Yes Yes Limited No

Secondary indexes Yes Yes Yes No Yes

Discretely writable collec-
tions

Yes Yes Yes Yes No

Relational joins No Yes No No No

Built-in MapReduce No No Yes No Yes

Fast result ordering Yes Yes Yes Yes No

Configurable at query
level

Configurable at cluster
level

Immediate consistency Yes Yes Yes

Transparent sharding Yes No Yes No Yes

No single point of failure Yes No No No Yes

High throughput writes Yes No No Yes Yes

As you can see, Cassandra offers a unique combination of scalability, availability, and a
rich set of features for modeling and accessing data.