DBMS > Alibaba Cloud MaxCompute vs. Couchbase vs. Datomic vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. PostgreSQL

System Properties Comparison Alibaba Cloud MaxCompute vs. Couchbase vs. Datomic vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. PostgreSQL

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

MaxCompute (previously known as ODPS) is a general purpose, fully managed, multi-tenancy data processing platform for large-scale data warehousing

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

Datomic builds on immutable values, supports point-in-time queries and uses 3rd party systems for durability

Cloud Firestore is an auto-scaling document database for storing, syncing, and querying data for mobile and web apps. It offers seamless integration with other Firebase and Google Cloud Platform products.

Widely used open source RDBMS

Developed as objectoriented DBMS (Postgres), gradually enhanced with 'standards' like SQL

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

a graph-processing framework is available with the graphs being stored in tables

with object oriented extensions, e.g.: user defined types/functions and inheritance. Handling of key/value pairs with hstore module.

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
Graph DBMS

with Apache Age
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

with pgvector extension

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

Score	0.77
Rank	#214	Overall
	#98	Relational DBMS

Score	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	1.59
Rank	#150	Overall
	#69	Relational DBMS

Score	7.85
Rank	#51	Overall
	#8	Document stores

Score	645.54
Rank	#4	Overall
	#4	Relational DBMS

Website

www.alibabacloud.com/product/maxcompute

www.couchbase.com

www.datomic.com

firebase.google.com/products/firestore

www.postgresql.org

Technical documentation

www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/maxcompute

docs.couchbase.com

docs.datomic.com

firebase.google.com/docs/firestore

www.postgresql.org/docs

Developer

Alibaba

Couchbase, Inc.

Cognitect

Google

PostgreSQL Global Development Group

www.postgresql.org/developer

Initial release

2016

2011

2012

2017

1989

1989: Postgres, 1996: PostgreSQL

Current release

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

1.0.6735, June 2023

16.3, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

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

commercial

limited edition free

commercial

Open Source

BSD

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

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Implementation language

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Java, Clojure

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
NetBSD
OpenBSD
OS X
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

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

specific XML-type available, but no XML query functionality.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

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

yes

standard with numerous extensions

APIs and other access methods

Fluentd
Flume
MaxCompute Console

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

RESTful HTTP API

Android
gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

Java

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Clojure
Java

Go
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
Python

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

in Java

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

yes

Transaction Functions

yes, Firebase Rules & Cloud Functions

user defined functions

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

By using transaction functions

yes, with Cloud Functions

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Automatic Sharding

none

But extensive use of caching in the application peers

Sharding

partitioning by range, list and (since PostgreSQL 11) by hash

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

none

But extensive use of caching in the application peers

Multi-source replication

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Using Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

yes

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

using external storage systems (e.g. Cassandra, DynamoDB, PostgreSQL, Couchbase and others)

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

Ephemeral buckets

yes

recommended only for testing and development

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users and roles

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

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management. Security Rules for 3rd party authentication using Firebase Auth.

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

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and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.

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