DBMS > Amazon DocumentDB vs. Cassandra vs. CouchDB vs. Datomic vs. Elasticsearch

System Properties Comparison Amazon DocumentDB vs. Cassandra vs. CouchDB vs. Datomic vs. Elasticsearch

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed MongoDB-compatible database service

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

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

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

A distributed, RESTful modern search and analytics engine based on Apache Lucene

Elasticsearch lets you perform and combine many types of searches such as structured, unstructured, geo, and metric

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

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

Score	1.91
Rank	#132	Overall
	#24	Document stores

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	9.30
Rank	#45	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	1.59
Rank	#150	Overall
	#69	Relational DBMS

Score	135.35
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Website

aws.amazon.com/documentdb

cassandra.apache.org

couchdb.apache.org

www.datomic.com

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

Technical documentation

aws.amazon.com/documentdb/resources

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

docs.datomic.com

www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Apache Software Foundation

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

Cognitect

Elastic

Initial release

2019

2008

2005

2012

2010

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

3.3.3, December 2023

1.0.6735, June 2023

8.6, January 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

limited edition free

Open Source

Elastic License

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.

Astra DB: Multi-cloud DBaaS built on Apache Cassandra.

Implementation language

Java

Erlang

Java, Clojure

Java

Server operating systems

hosted

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

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

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

via views

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like SELECT, DML and DDL statements (CQL)

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

proprietary protocol using JSON (MongoDB compatible)

Proprietary protocol

CQL (Cassandra Query Language, an SQL-like language)
Thrift

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

RESTful HTTP API

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

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

Clojure
Java

.Net
Groovy
Community Contributed Clients
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

yes

Transaction Functions

yes

Triggers

yes

By using transaction functions

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

none

But extensive use of caching in the application peers

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-availability zones for high availability, asynchronous replication for up to 15 read replicas

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

But extensive use of caching in the application peers

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

yes

ES-Hadoop Connector

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

typically not used, however similar functionality with DBRef possible

Transaction concepts

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

Atomic single-document operations

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

atomic operations within a single document possible

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

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

recommended only for testing and development

Memcached and Redis integration

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users and roles

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Access rights for users can be defined per database

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
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Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
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Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
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Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
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Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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