DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Citus vs. Derby vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Realm

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Citus vs. Derby vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Realm

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

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

Full-featured RDBMS with a small footprint, either embedded into a Java application or used as a database server.

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

A DBMS built for use on mobile devices that’s a fast, easy to use alternative to SQLite and Core Data

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Relational DBMS

Document store

Secondary database models

Document store

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	2.21
Rank	#118	Overall
	#56	Relational DBMS

Score	4.71
Rank	#69	Overall
	#37	Relational DBMS

Score	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	7.60
Rank	#52	Overall
	#9	Document stores

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

www.citusdata.com

db.apache.org/derby

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

realm.io

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

docs.citusdata.com

db.apache.org/derby/manuals/index.html

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

realm.io/docs

Developer

Amazon

Apache Software Foundation

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

Initial release

2012

2010

1997

2010

2014

Current release

8.1, December 2018

10.17.1.0, November 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

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

Erlang

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Android
Backend: server-less
iOS
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

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.

yes

specific XML type available, but no XML query functionality

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

standard, with numerous extensions

yes

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

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

JDBC

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

Java

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

.Net
Java

with Android only
Objective-C
React Native
Swift

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

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

Java Stored Procedures

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

runs within the applications so server-side scripts are unnecessary

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes

Change Listeners

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

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

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

ACID

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

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.

yes

In-Memory realm

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

Access rights for users can be defined per database

yes

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