DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. CockroachDB vs. Lovefield vs. Memcached vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. CockroachDB vs. Lovefield vs. Memcached vs. Sphinx

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

CockroachDB is a distributed database architected for modern cloud applications. It is wire compatible with PostgreSQL and backed by a Key-Value Store, which is either RocksDB or a purpose-built derivative, called Pebble.

Embeddable relational database for web apps written in pure JavaScript

In-memory key-value store, originally intended for caching

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

Search engine

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

Score	70.06
Rank	#17	Overall
	#3	Document stores
	#2	Key-value stores

Score	4.74
Rank	#67	Overall
	#36	Relational DBMS

Score	0.22
Rank	#306	Overall
	#138	Relational DBMS

Score	16.84
Rank	#32	Overall
	#4	Key-value stores

Score	5.97
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

www.cockroachlabs.com

google.github.io/lovefield

www.memcached.org

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

www.cockroachlabs.com/docs

github.com/google/lovefield/blob/master/docs/spec_index.md

github.com/memcached/memcached/wiki

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Amazon

Cockroach Labs

Google

Danga Interactive

originally developed by Brad Fitzpatrick for LiveJournal

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2012

2015

2014

2003

2001

Current release

24.1.0, May 2024

2.1.12, February 2017

1.6.29, June 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

Open Source

Apache 2.0, commercial license available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

BSD license

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

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

JavaScript

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
macOS
Windows

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

tested with Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

dynamic schema

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

yes, wire compatible with PostgreSQL

SQL-like query language

via JavaScript builder pattern

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

JDBC

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
C++
Clojure
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby
Rust

JavaScript

.Net
C
C++
ColdFusion
Erlang
Java
Lisp
Lua
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

Using read-only observers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

horizontal partitioning (by key range)

all tables are translated to an ordered KV store and then broken down into 64MB ranges, which are then used as replicas in RAFT

none

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication using RAFT

none

Repcached, a Memcached patch, provides this functionallity

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

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

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, by using IndexedDB or the cloud service Firebase Realtime Database

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

using MemoryDB

User concepts

Access control

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

Role-based access control

yes

using SASL (Simple Authentication and Security Layer) protocol

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