DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Amazon SimpleDB vs. CouchDB

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Amazon SimpleDB vs. CouchDB

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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

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

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Key-value store

Document store

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

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

Score	77.57
Rank	#16	Overall
	#2	Document stores
	#2	Key-value stores

Score	1.88
Rank	#139	Overall
	#24	Key-value stores

Score	10.26
Rank	#45	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

aws.amazon.com/simpledb

couchdb.apache.org

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

docs.aws.amazon.com/simpledb

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

Developer

Amazon

Apache Software Foundation

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

Initial release

2012

2007

2005

Current release

3.3.3, December 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

Erlang

Server operating systems

hosted

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

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

All columns are indexed automatically

yes

via views

SQL

Support of SQL

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

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

improved architecture with release 2.0

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

yes

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

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

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

atomic operations within a single document possible

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

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.

User concepts

Access control

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

Access rights for users can be defined per database

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