DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. CouchDB vs. HBase vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Microsoft Azure Table Storage

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. CouchDB vs. HBase vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Microsoft Azure Table Storage

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.

Wide-column store based on Apache Hadoop and on concepts of BigTable

A high performance, column-oriented RDBMS, specifically developed to harness the massive parallelism of modern CPU and GPU hardware

A Wide Column Store for rapid development using massive semi-structured datasets

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

Spatial 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	30.50
Rank	#26	Overall
	#2	Wide column stores

Score	1.77
Rank	#141	Overall
	#65	Relational DBMS

Score	4.48
Rank	#75	Overall
	#6	Wide column stores

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

couchdb.apache.org

hbase.apache.org

github.com/heavyai/heavydb
www.heavy.ai

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/storage/tables

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

hbase.apache.org/book.html

docs.heavy.ai

Developer

Amazon

Apache Software Foundation

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

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Powerset

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

Microsoft

Initial release

2012

2005

2008

2016

2012

Current release

3.3.3, December 2023

2.3.4, January 2021

5.10, January 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

Erlang

Java

C++ and CUDA

Server operating systems

hosted

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
Unix
Windows

using Cygwin

Linux

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

schema-free, schema definition possible

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

options to bring your own types, AVRO

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Java API
RESTful HTTP API
Thrift

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

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

C
C#
C++
Groovy
Java
PHP
Python
Scala

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

.Net
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

yes

Coprocessors in Java

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

Sharding

Round robin

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication

yes

implicit feature of the cloud service. Replication either local, cross-facility or geo-redundant.

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 or Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

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

Single row ACID (across millions of columns)

optimistic locking

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.

yes

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

Access Control Lists (ACL) for RBAC, integration with Apache Ranger for RBAC & ABAC

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights based on private key authentication or shared access signatures

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