DBMS > AlaSQL vs. Amazon SimpleDB vs. IBM Cloudant vs. MySQL vs. PostGIS

System Properties Comparison AlaSQL vs. Amazon SimpleDB vs. IBM Cloudant vs. MySQL vs. PostGIS

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

JavaScript DBMS library

Hosted simple database service by Amazon, with the data stored in the Amazon Cloud.

There is an unrelated product called SimpleDB developed by Edward Sciore

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Widely used open source RDBMS

Spatial extension of PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Document store
Relational DBMS

Key-value store

Document store

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Spatial DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	0.51
Rank	#256	Overall
	#40	Document stores
	#118	Relational DBMS

Score	1.88
Rank	#133	Overall
	#23	Key-value stores

Score	2.75
Rank	#104	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Score	1061.34
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	21.72
Rank	#29	Overall
	#1	Spatial DBMS

Website

alasql.org

aws.amazon.com/simpledb

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

www.mysql.com

postgis.net

Technical documentation

github.com/AlaSQL/alasql

docs.aws.amazon.com/simpledb

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

dev.mysql.com/doc

postgis.net/documentation

Developer

Andrey Gershun & Mathias R. Wulff

Amazon

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Initial release

2014

2007

2010

1995

2005

Current release

8.4.0, April 2024

3.4.2, February 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

MIT-License

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

Open Source

GPL v2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

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Database as a Service

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Implementation language

JavaScript

Erlang

C and C++

Server operating systems

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

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

All columns are indexed automatically

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

APIs and other access methods

JavaScript API

RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Supported programming languages

JavaScript

.Net
C
C++
Erlang
Java
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

yes

proprietary syntax

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding must be implemented in the application

Sharding

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

yes

based on PostgreSQL

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

based on PostgreSQL

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

none

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

only for local storage and DOM-storage

Concurrent data updates can be detected by the application

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

yes

based on PostgreSQL

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