Column-oriented database systems

Column-oriented databases, also known as wide column stores, store data from several entries together with a time stamp in columns. Columns with similar or related content can be combined in a Column family.

Database systems

Examples of column-oriented database systems are Cassandra, Hypertable and HBase.

Home	Cassandra	Hypertable	HBase
GitHub	apache/cassandra	vicaya/hypertable	apache/hbase
Docs	cassandra.apache.org/doc/	hypertable.com/documentation	hbase.apache.org/book.html
Application areas	Georedundancy, high writing speed, democratic peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture, data with a defined lifetime	Hypertable’s Bigtable design solves horizontal scaling problems through a distributed storage system for structured data.	IoT, fraud detection, recommendation engines
Development language	Java	C++	Java
Licenses	Apache License 2.0	GPL-3.0 License	Apache-2.0 License
Data model	Column Family correspond to tables, Keyspaces databases; no logical structure, no scheme	Associative arrays	Tables divided into regions
Query langauge	Cassandra Query Language (CQL)	Hypertable Query Language (HQL)	Java Client API, Thrift/REST API
Transactions, concurrency	Eventual Consistency	MVCC – Multiversion Concurrency Control	ACID per line, MVCC – Multiversion Concurrency Control
Replication, scaling	SimpleStrategy, NetworkTopologyStrategy and OldNetworkTopologyStrategy	File system level replication	Master-Slave-Replication
Remarks		is based on distributed file systems such as Apache Hadoop, DFS or GlusterFS