DBMS > AlaSQL vs. Amazon DynamoDB vs. CouchDB vs. Hawkular Metrics vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

System Properties Comparison AlaSQL vs. Amazon DynamoDB vs. CouchDB vs. Hawkular Metrics vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

JavaScript DBMS library

Hosted, scalable database service by Amazon with the data stored in Amazons cloud

A native JSON - document store inspired by Lotus Notes, scalable from globally distributed server-clusters down to mobile phones.

Hawkular metrics is the metric storage of the Red Hat sponsored Hawkular monitoring system. It is based on Cassandra.

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Primary database model

Document store
Relational DBMS

Document store
Key-value store

Document store

Time Series DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	0.49
Rank	#259	Overall
	#40	Document stores
	#120	Relational DBMS

Score	77.57
Rank	#16	Overall
	#2	Document stores
	#2	Key-value stores

Score	10.26
Rank	#45	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	0.04
Rank	#374	Overall
	#38	Time Series DBMS

Score	29.85
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Website

alasql.org

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

couchdb.apache.org

www.hawkular.org

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

Technical documentation

github.com/AlaSQL/alasql

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

www.hawkular.org/hawkular-metrics/docs/user-guide

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

Developer

Andrey Gershun & Mathias R. Wulff

Amazon

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Damien Katz, a former Lotus Notes developer

Community supported by Red Hat

Microsoft

Initial release

2014

2012

2005

2014

Current release

3.3.3, December 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

MIT-License

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Implementation language

JavaScript

Erlang

Java

Server operating systems

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

hosted

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

via views

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to SQL99, but no user access control, stored procedures and host language bindings.

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

JavaScript API

RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

HTTP REST

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

Supported programming languages

JavaScript

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C
C#
ColdFusion
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
Ruby
Smalltalk

Go
Java
Python
Ruby

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

JavaScript

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes

via Hawkular Alerting

JavaScript

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

Sharding

based on Cassandra

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

selectable replication factor

based on Cassandra

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

yes

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

none

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

Eventual Consistency

based on Cassandra
Immediate Consistency

based on Cassandra

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

only for local storage and DOM-storage

ACID

ACID across one or more tables within a single AWS account and region

atomic operations within a single document possible

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using IndexedDB, SQL.JS or proprietary FileStorage

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users and roles can be defined via the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Access rights for users can be defined per database

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

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