With industries ranging from IoT to manufacturing generating and collecting a constantly increasing amount of time-series data, the growth of the time-series database (TSDB) market over the past five years has not come as a surprise. This popularity has resulted in a large number of time series DB solutions coming on the market, sometimes making it difficult to choose the best time series database for a certain business scenario. This article compares two databases that can be used for time-series data processing – Cassandra and TDengine – to help you determine which is right for your use case.
Apache Cassandra is an open-source NoSQL distributed database known for enabling fault tolerance on commodity hardware. Although Cassandra is an Apache Foundation project, a commercial version is also provided by DataStax. While Cassandra is not a time-series database, it does have some characteristics suited for time-series data processing and has been used in similar scenarios.
TDengine is an open-source time-series database that differentiates itself with high performance, a distributed cloud-native architecture, and built-in caching, data subscription, and stream processing that simplify the overall system design.
The following table compares the basic information of Cassandra vs. TDengine.
| Cassandra | TDengine | |
|---|---|---|
| Creator | Apache | TDengine |
| Initial release | 2008 | 2017 |
| Main development language | Java | C |
| Main query language | CQL (proprietary) | Standard SQL |
| License | Apache | AGPL |
| Operating systems | Linux, macOS, and Windows | Linux, macOS, and Windows |
The following table indicates specific features supported by Cassandra vs. TDengine.
| Feature | Cassandra | TDengine |
|---|---|---|
| SQL syntax | ❌ | ✅ |
| Private deployment | ❌ | ✅ |
| Scalability | ❌ | ✅ |
| System connection management | ✅ | ✅ |
| Query task management | ✅ | ✅ |
| Data import | ✅ | ✅ |
| Data export | ✅ | ✅ |
| Web management | ✅ | ✅ |
| Multi-layer storage | ✅ | ✅ |
| Telegraf data collection | ✅ | ✅ |
| Grafana data visualization | ✅ | ✅ |
| REST API | ✅ | ✅ |
| C/C++ connector | ❌ | ✅ |
| JDBC support | ❌ | ✅ |
| Go connector | ✅ | ✅ |
| Python connector | ✅ | ✅ |
| Database configuration | ✅ | ✅ |
| Replica configuration | ✅ | ✅ |
| Data retention policy | ✅ | ✅ |
| Data partitioning | ✅ | ✅ |
| Stream processing | ❌ | ✅ |
| Data subscription | ❌ | ✅ |
| Microsecond precision | ✅ | ✅ |
| Aggregation | ✅ | ✅ |
| Downsampling | ✅ | ✅ |
| Limits and offsets | ✅ | ✅ |
