DBMS > Amazon Aurora vs. Couchbase vs. CrateDB vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. IBM Db2

System Properties Comparison Amazon Aurora vs. Couchbase vs. CrateDB vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. IBM Db2

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

MySQL and PostgreSQL compatible cloud service by Amazon

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

Distributed Database based on Lucene

A horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service. It is the externalization of the core Google database that runs the biggest aspects of Google, like Ads and Google Play.

Common in IBM host environments, 2 different versions for host and Windows/Linux

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

Since Version 10.5 support for JSON/BSON documents compatible with MongoDB

Secondary database models

Document store

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

Relational DBMS

Document store
RDF store

in Db2 LUW (Linux, Unix, Windows)
Spatial DBMS

with Db2 Spatial Extender

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

Score	7.57
Rank	#51	Overall
	#32	Relational DBMS

Score	16.59
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	0.71
Rank	#227	Overall
	#37	Document stores
	#5	Spatial DBMS
	#16	Search engines
	#19	Time Series DBMS
	#8	Vector DBMS

Score	2.84
Rank	#100	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Score	125.90
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora

www.couchbase.com

cratedb.com

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.ibm.com/products/db2

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/CHAP_Aurora.html

docs.couchbase.com

cratedb.com/docs

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

www.ibm.com/docs/en/db2

Developer

Amazon

Couchbase, Inc.

Crate

Google

IBM

Initial release

2015

2011

2013

2017

1983

host version

Current release

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

12.1, October 2016

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

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

Open Source

commercial

free version is 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.

CrateDB Cloud: a distributed SQL database that spreads data and processing across an elastic cluster of shared nothing nodes. CrateDB Cloud enables data insights at scale on Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud Platform.

Implementation language

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Java

C and C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

All Operating Systems, including Kubernetes with CrateDB Kubernetes Operator support

hosted

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Windows
z/OS

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Flexible Schema (defined schema, partial schema, 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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

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

yes, but no triggers and constraints, and PostgreSQL compatibility

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol
Prometheus Remote Read/Write
RESTful HTTP API

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
JSON style queries

MongoDB compatible
ODBC
XQuery

Supported programming languages

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

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.NET
Erlang
Go

community maintained client
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

community maintained client
Perl

community maintained client
PHP
Python
R
Ruby

community maintained client
Scala

community maintained client

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C
C#
C++
Cobol
Delphi
Fortran
Java
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Visual Basic

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

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

user defined functions (Javascript)

yes

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

horizontal partitioning

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

only with Windows/Unix/Linux Version

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Configurable replication on table/partition-level

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

yes

with separate tools (MQ, InfoSphere)

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Eventual Consistency
Read-after-write consistency on record level

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

unique row identifiers can be used for implementing an optimistic concurrency control strategy

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

rights management via user accounts

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

The enterprise database for time series, documents, and vectors. Distributed - Native...
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Competitive advantages

Response time in milliseconds: e ven for complex ad-hoc queries. Massive scaling...
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Typical application scenarios

IoT: accelerate your IIoT projects with CrateDB, delivering real-time analytics...
» more

Key customers

Across all continents, CrateDB is used by companies of all sizes to meet the most...
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Market metrics

The CrateDB open source project was started in 2013 Honorable Mention in 2021 Gartner®...
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Licensing and pricing models

See CrateDB pricing >
» more

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