DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Amazon SimpleDB vs. Couchbase vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Amazon SimpleDB vs. Couchbase vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

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

A high performance, column-oriented RDBMS, specifically developed to harness the massive parallelism of modern CPU and GPU hardware

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Key-value store

Document store

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Secondary database models

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

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	74.07
Rank	#17	Overall
	#3	Document stores
	#2	Key-value stores

Score	1.85
Rank	#138	Overall
	#24	Key-value stores

Score	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	1.77
Rank	#141	Overall
	#65	Relational DBMS

Score	29.04
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

aws.amazon.com/simpledb

www.couchbase.com

github.com/heavyai/heavydb
www.heavy.ai

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

docs.aws.amazon.com/simpledb

docs.couchbase.com

docs.heavy.ai

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

Developer

Amazon

Couchbase, Inc.

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

Microsoft

Initial release

2012

2007

2011

2016

2014

Current release

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

5.10, January 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

commercial

Open Source

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

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

commercial

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

C, C++, Go and Erlang

C++ and CUDA

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

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

All properties auto-indexed by default

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

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

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

JavaScript

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes

via the TAP protocol

JavaScript

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding must be implemented in the application

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

Round robin

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

yes

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

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
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session 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

ACID

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

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

yes

User concepts

Access control

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

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

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