DBMS > Altibase vs. ClickHouse vs. CouchDB vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Altibase vs. ClickHouse vs. CouchDB vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Sphinx

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

An enterprise grade, high-performance RDBMS

A high-performance, column-oriented SQL DBMS for online analytical processing (OLAP) that uses all available system resources to their full potential to process each analytical query as fast as possible. It is available as both an open-source software and a cloud offering.

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

Cloud-hosted realtime document store. iOS, Android, and JavaScript clients share one Realtime Database instance and automatically receive updates with the newest data.

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

Search engine

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

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

Score	1.02
Rank	#189	Overall
	#88	Relational DBMS

Score	15.55
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	8.30
Rank	#47	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	13.64
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

altibase.com

clickhouse.com

couchdb.apache.org

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

github.com/ALTIBASE/Documents/tree/master/Manuals

clickhouse.com/docs

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

firebase.google.com/docs/database

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Altibase

Clickhouse Inc.

Apache Software Foundation

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

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

1999

2016

2005

2012

2001

Current release

v7.3, 2023, August 2023

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

3.3.3, December 2023

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open source edition discontinued with March 2023

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

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.

DoubleCloud: Fully managed ClickHouse alongside best-in-class managed open-source services to build analytics at scale.
Aiven for Clickhouse: Managed cloud data warehousing with high-speed analytics.
ClickHouse Cloud: Get the performance you love from open source ClickHouse in a serverless offering that takes care of the details so you can spend more time getting insight out of the fastest database on earth.

Implementation language

C++

Erlang

C++

Server operating systems

AIX
HP-UX
Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

via views

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

ANSI SQL-92

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol

gRPC
HTTP REST
JDBC
MySQL wire protocol
ODBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol
Proprietary protocol

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

C
C++
Java

3rd party library
C++
Elixir

3rd party library
Go

3rd party library
Java

3rd party library
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party library
Kotlin

3rd party library
Nim

3rd party library
Perl

3rd party library
PHP

3rd party library
Python

3rd party library
R

3rd party library
Ruby

3rd party library
Rust
Scala

3rd party library

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

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

stored procedures and stored functions

yes

View functions in JavaScript

limited functionality with using 'rules'

Triggers

yes

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

key based and custom

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

Sharding

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Asynchronous and synchronous physical replication; geographically distributed replicas; support for object storages.

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

atomic operations within a single document possible

yes

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

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

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights for users and roles. Column and row based policies. Quotas and resource limits. Pluggable authentication with LDAP and Kerberos. Password based, X.509 certificate, and SSH key authentication.

Access rights for users can be defined per database

yes, based on authentication and database rules

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