DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Amazon SimpleDB vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. RethinkDB vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Amazon SimpleDB vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. RethinkDB vs. TimescaleDB

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

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

DBMS for the Web with a mechanism to push updated query results to applications in realtime.

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

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Key-value store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Document store

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.74
Rank	#105	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Score	4.64
Rank	#71	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

aws.amazon.com/simpledb

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

rethinkdb.com

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

docs.aws.amazon.com/simpledb

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

rethinkdb.com/docs

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Amazon

Microsoft

The Linux Foundation

since July 2017

Timescale

Initial release

2012

2007

2014

2009

2017

Current release

2.4.1, August 2020

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2

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++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

yes

string, binary, float, bool, date, geometry

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

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

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

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

community-supported driver
C#

community-supported driver
C++

community-supported driver
Clojure

community-supported driver
Dart

community-supported driver
Erlang

community-supported driver
Go

community-supported driver
Haskell

community-supported driver
Java

official driver
JavaScript (Node.js)

official driver
Lisp

community-supported driver
Lua

community-supported driver
Objective-C

community-supported driver
Perl

community-supported driver
PHP

community-supported driver
Python

official driver
Ruby

official driver
Scala

community-supported driver

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

JavaScript

Client-side triggers through changefeeds

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding must be implemented in the application

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

range based

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

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)

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

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

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session 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

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

Atomic single-document operations

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

MVCC based

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 can be defined down to the item level

yes

users and table-level permissions

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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