DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Amazon SimpleDB vs. Hypertable vs. IBM Cloudant vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Amazon SimpleDB vs. Hypertable vs. IBM Cloudant vs. TimescaleDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Hypertable has stopped its further development with March 2016 and is removed from the DB-Engines ranking.

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

An open source BigTable implementation based on distributed file systems such as Hadoop

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Secondary database models

Relational 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	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	4.64
Rank	#71	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

aws.amazon.com/simpledb

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

docs.aws.amazon.com/simpledb

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Amazon

Hypertable Inc.

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Timescale

Initial release

2012

2007

2009

2010

2017

Current release

0.9.8.11, March 2016

2.13.0, November 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

commercial

Open Source

GNU version 3. Commercial license available

commercial

Open Source

Apache 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

C++

Erlang

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

an inofficial Windows port is available

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data 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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

All columns are indexed automatically

restricted

only exact value or prefix value scans

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

C++ API
Thrift

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

C++
Java
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

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

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

selectable replication factor on file system level

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

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

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Immediate 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

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

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.

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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