DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Amazon SimpleDB vs. Citus vs. NSDb

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Amazon SimpleDB vs. Citus vs. NSDb

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Hosted, scalable database service by Amazon with the data stored in Amazons cloud

Hosted simple database service by Amazon, with the data stored in the Amazon Cloud.

There is an unrelated product called SimpleDB developed by Edward Sciore

Scalable hybrid operational and analytics RDBMS for big data use cases based on PostgreSQL

Scalable, High-performance Time Series DBMS designed for Real-time Analytics on top of Kubernetes

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Key-value store

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

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

Score	74.45
Rank	#17	Overall
	#3	Document stores
	#2	Key-value stores

Score	1.88
Rank	#133	Overall
	#23	Key-value stores

Score	2.15
Rank	#117	Overall
	#56	Relational DBMS

Score	0.08
Rank	#369	Overall
	#40	Time Series DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

aws.amazon.com/simpledb

www.citusdata.com

nsdb.io

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

docs.aws.amazon.com/simpledb

docs.citusdata.com

nsdb.io/Architecture

Developer

Amazon

Initial release

2012

2007

2010

2017

Current release

8.1, December 2018

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

commercial

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

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

Java, Scala

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

Linux
macOS

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes: int, bigint, decimal, string

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

All columns are indexed automatically

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

standard, with numerous extensions

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

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

gRPC
HTTP REST
WebSocket

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Erlang
Java
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

Java
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

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

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding must be implemented in the application

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

ACID across one or more tables within a single AWS account and region

Concurrent data updates can be detected by the application

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Using Apache Lucene

In-memory capabilities

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

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users and roles can be defined via the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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