DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. CouchDB vs. Elasticsearch vs. Firebase Realtime Database

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. CouchDB vs. Elasticsearch vs. Firebase Realtime Database

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

A native JSON - document store inspired by Lotus Notes, scalable from globally distributed server-clusters down to mobile phones.

A distributed, RESTful modern search and analytics engine based on Apache Lucene

Elasticsearch lets you perform and combine many types of searches such as structured, unstructured, geo, and metric

Cloud-hosted realtime document store. iOS, Android, and JavaScript clients share one Realtime Database instance and automatically receive updates with the newest data.

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Document store

Search engine

Document store

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector 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	9.30
Rank	#45	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	135.35
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

couchdb.apache.org

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/index.html

firebase.google.com/docs/database

Developer

Amazon

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Damien Katz, a former Lotus Notes developer

Elastic

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Initial release

2012

2005

2010

2012

Current release

3.3.3, December 2023

8.6, January 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Elastic License

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

Erlang

Java

Server operating systems

hosted

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

schema-free

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

via views

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C
C#
ColdFusion
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
Ruby
Smalltalk

.Net
Groovy
Community Contributed Clients
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

yes

limited functionality with using 'rules'

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

yes

ES-Hadoop Connector

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

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

atomic operations within a single document possible

yes

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: 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.

Memcached and Redis integration

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

yes, based on authentication and database rules

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