FEATURE COMPARISON*

GridGain vs. GemFire

The GridGain In-Memory Data Fabric is a proven software solution, which delivers ultimate speed and scale to accelerate
your business and time to insights. It enables high-performance, full ACID transactions, real-time streaming and fast analytics
in a single, comprehensive data access and processing layer, which includes a clustering and compute grid, a database-agnostic
data grid, an in-memory streaming engine as well as Hadoop acceleration.
The GridGain In-Memory Data Fabric provides a unified API that spans all key types of applications (Java, .NET, C++) and
connects them with multiple data stores containing structured, semi-structured and unstructured data (SQL, NoSQL,
Hadoop). It offers a secure, highly available and manageable data processing environment.
EDITION

FEATURE

IMDG

Distributed Key-Value Store

GRIDGAIN 6.5

GEMFIRE 8.0

Local
Partitioned
Replicated

IMDG

Generic Cache Features

Near Cache
Refresh-Ahead

Delta (Partial) Updates

Persistence - Read-Through, Write-Through,
Write-Behind to Database
Data Redundancy (i.e. key backups)
Synchronous and Asynchronous Backup Update

(synchronous only)

Synchronous APIs
Asynchronous APIs
Fully Async Mode (Primary and Backups are Async)
Memcached API
Off-Heap Near Cache

(values only)

Data Affinity and Collocation of Compute and Data

(rich support)

Eviction and Expiration

(LRU, FIFO, Random, Custom)

(LRU)

Pluggable interfaces (SPIs) to customize grid subsystems

IMDG

Integration
Plug-n-Play Web Session Clustering
Plug-n-Play Hibernate L2 Caching

IMDG

Distributed Queries (Searches)

OQL Queries
SQL Queries
Continuous Queries
In-Memory Indexes
Distributed SQL Joins (select * from Person p,
Company c where p.c_id=c.id)
In-Memory Off-Heap Indexes for Off-Heap Data
Group Indexes
JDBC Driver

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EDITION

FEATURE

IMDG

ACID Compliant Transactions

GRIDGAIN 6.5

GEMFIRE 8.0

Atomic Mode (one operation at a time)

Optimistic Concurrency (Two-Phase-Commit)
READ_COMMITTED and REPEATABLE_READ

(READ_COMMITTED only)

XA Integration
Fault Tolerance (Including client/near/primary/backup
node failures)
Pessimistic Concurrency (Two-Phase-Commit)
One-Phase-Commit Optimization
Custom Affinity (Partitioning) Function
Near Cache Transactions (i.e. Client Cache Transactions)
Eviction / Expiration Policies for Transactional Caches
Merge with DB Transactions (e.g. Oracle DB, MySql, etc.)
Cross-Partition Transactions

IMDG

Data Loading and Rebalancing

Sync Preloading (aka Sync Repartitioning)
Async Preloading (aka Async Repartitioning)
Delayed Preloading (delay preloading until all nodes started)

IMDG

Data Loader (optimized bulk put or load operations)

(via GridDataLoader)

Store Loader (optimized bulk DB load)

(via GridCacheStore.
loadCache method)

Distributed Data Structures

Distributed Queue
Distributed Lock
Distributed Atomic Long
Distributed Atomic Ref
Distributed Atomic Stamped Ref
Distributed Atomic Sequence
Distributed Count Down Latch

IMDG

Elastic Off-Heap Memory

On-Heap and Off-Heap Memory
Disk Overflow
Tiered On-Heap to Off-Heap to Disk Approach

Platform

Grid Management
GUI (graphical) Management Tool
Command-Line Management Tool
Elasticity (ability to add/remove grid nodes on demand)
Datacenter (WAN) Replication (Active-Active, Active-Passive)
Rolling Upgrades
Network Segmentation (Split Brain)
Distributed Event Notifications

(transactional)

Distributed Messaging
Security

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(ordered and unordered)

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EDITION

FEATURE

Platform

Security

GRIDGAIN 6.5

GEMFIRE 8.0

SSL Support
Client Authentication
Cluster Member Authentication
Per-Client Permissions

Client

Grid Client Connectivity

Java Thick Client
Java Thin Client
C++ Client
.NET/C# Client
Scala DSL
Dynamic structure changes

(Portable Objects)

(PDX)

.NET and C++ Near Cache

.NET and C++ Explicit Locking
.NET and C++ Transactions

HPC

Distributed Compute Features

Affinity-Aware Execution
Topic-based Publish/Subscribe Messaging
Point-to-Point Messaging
Sub-Grid Messaging / Task Execution
Zero Deployment Technology
Direct API for MapReduce
Early and Late Load Balancing
Computation State Checkpoints
Distributed Computation (Task) Sessions
Cron-like task scheduling

Streaming

In-Memory Streaming
Branching Pipelines (Workflows for stream processing)
Complex event processing (CEP)
Pluggable routing
Configurable data windows
Continuous queries over data windows

Cloud

Public And Private Clouds

TCP/IP Cluster Protocol (any cloud)
Automatic Dynamic IP Discovery (AWS / EC2)

(S3-based IP Finder)

Pluggable IP Discovery (any cloud)

Pre-configured AWS Images

* This comparison is based on our best knowledge of the features available in the GridGain In-Memory Data Fabric and in the
GemFire software at the time this document was created.

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other web site references, may change without notice. This document does not provide you with any legal rights to any intellectual property in any
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respective owners and used here for identification purposes only.

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