DBMS > AlaSQL vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Lovefield vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison AlaSQL vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Lovefield vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

JavaScript DBMS library

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Embeddable relational database for web apps written in pure JavaScript

Search-as-a-service for web and mobile app development

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Primary database model

Document store
Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

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	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	0.29
Rank	#293	Overall
	#133	Relational DBMS

Score	5.59
Rank	#63	Overall
	#7	Search engines

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

alasql.org

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

google.github.io/lovefield

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/search

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

github.com/AlaSQL/alasql

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

github.com/google/lovefield/blob/master/docs/spec_index.md

learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Andrey Gershun & Mathias R. Wulff

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Google

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2014

2010

2014

2015

2014

Current release

2.1.12, February 2017

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

MIT-License

commercial

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

JavaScript

Server operating systems

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

hosted

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

tested with Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

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

SQL

Support of SQL

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

SQL-like query language

via JavaScript builder pattern

yes

APIs and other access methods

JavaScript API

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

JavaScript

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

JavaScript

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

Using read-only observers

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

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

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

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using IndexedDB, SQL.JS or proprietary FileStorage

yes

yes, by using IndexedDB or the cloud service Firebase Realtime Database

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

using MemoryDB

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per database

yes

using Azure authentication

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

More information provided by the system vendor

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.