DBMS > AlaSQL vs. Couchbase vs. KairosDB vs. Sphinx vs. TiDB

System Properties Comparison AlaSQL vs. Couchbase vs. KairosDB vs. Sphinx vs. TiDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

JavaScript DBMS library

A distributed document store with integrated cache, a powerful search engine, in-built operational and analytical capabilities, and an embedded mobile database

Distributed Time Series DBMS based on Cassandra or H2

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

TiDB is an open source distributed SQL database that supports Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) workloads. It is MySQL compatible and features horizontal scalability, strong consistency, and high availability.

Primary database model

Document store
Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Key-value store

originating from the former Membase product and supporting the Memcached protocol
Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Document store

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

Score	0.46
Rank	#260	Overall
	#40	Document stores
	#121	Relational DBMS

Score	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	0.62
Rank	#239	Overall
	#20	Time Series DBMS

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	4.66
Rank	#70	Overall
	#38	Relational DBMS

Website

alasql.org

www.couchbase.com

github.com/kairosdb/kairosdb

sphinxsearch.com

pingcap.com

Technical documentation

github.com/AlaSQL/alasql

docs.couchbase.com

kairosdb.github.io

sphinxsearch.com/docs

docs.pingcap.com/tidb/stable

Developer

Andrey Gershun & Mathias R. Wulff

Couchbase, Inc.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

PingCAP, Inc.

Initial release

2014

2011

2013

2001

2016

Current release

Server: 7.2, June 2023; Mobile: 3.1, March 2022; Couchbase Capella (DBaaS), June 2023

1.2.2, November 2018

3.5.1, February 2023

8.0.0, March 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

MIT-License

Open Source

Business Source License (BSL 1.1); Commercial licenses also available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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

TiDB Cloud: Fully-managed TiDB Service. Bring everything great about TiDB to the cloud.

Implementation language

JavaScript

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Java

C++

Go, Rust

Server operating systems

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

Linux
OS X
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

SQL++, extends ANSI SQL to JSON for operational, transactional, and analytic use cases

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

APIs and other access methods

JavaScript API

CLI Client
HTTP REST
Kafka Connector
Native language bindings for CRUD, Query, Search and Analytics APIs
Spark Connector
Spring Data

Graphite protocol
HTTP REST
Telnet API

Proprietary protocol

GORM
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
SQLAlchemy

Supported programming languages

JavaScript

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

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

Functions and timers in JavaScript and UDFs in Java, Python, SQL++

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

based on Cassandra

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

horizontal partitioning (by key range)

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

selectable replication factor

based on Cassandra

none

Using Raft consensus algorithm to ensure data replication with strong consistency among multiple replicas.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

with TiSpark Connector

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

none

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Eventual Consistency

based on Cassandra
Immediate Consistency

based on Cassandra

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

full support since version 6.6

Transaction concepts

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

yes

only for local storage and DOM-storage

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using IndexedDB, SQL.JS or proprietary FileStorage

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

Ephemeral buckets

User concepts

Access control

User and Administrator separation with password-based and LDAP integrated Authentication. Role-base access control.

simple password-based access control

Fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

TiDB is an advanced open-source, distributed SQL database for modern application...
» more

Competitive advantages

- HORIZONTAL SCALING : TiDB grants total transparency into your data workloads without...
» more

Typical application scenarios

TiDB is ideal for transactional applications that require extreme scalability and...
» more

Key customers

Block, Pinterest, Catalyst, Bolt, Flipkart, Capcom, Shopee (E-commerce), JD Cloud...
» more

Market metrics

34K+ GitHub stars 5K+ members in TiDB Community Slack 1K+ community contributors...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

TiDB Community : Free open source software (Apache 2.0) TiDB Self-Hosted : Enterprise...
» more

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.