DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Datomic vs. Memcached vs. Oracle Berkeley DB

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Datomic vs. Memcached vs. Oracle Berkeley DB

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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

Datomic builds on immutable values, supports point-in-time queries and uses 3rd party systems for durability

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

Widely used in-process key-value store

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

supports sorted and unsorted key sets
Native XML DBMS

in the Oracle Berkeley DB XML version

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

Score	74.45
Rank	#17	Overall
	#3	Document stores
	#2	Key-value stores

Score	1.66
Rank	#144	Overall
	#66	Relational DBMS

Score	18.08
Rank	#32	Overall
	#4	Key-value stores

Score	2.01
Rank	#126	Overall
	#21	Key-value stores
	#3	Native XML DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

www.datomic.com

www.memcached.org

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/berkeleydb.html

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

docs.datomic.com

github.com/memcached/memcached/wiki

docs.oracle.com/cd/E17076_05/html/index.html

Developer

Amazon

Cognitect

Danga Interactive

originally developed by Brad Fitzpatrick for LiveJournal

Oracle

originally developed by Sleepycat, which was acquired by Oracle

Initial release

2012

2003

1994

Current release

1.0.6735, June 2023

1.6.27, May 2024

18.1.40, May 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

commercial

limited edition free

Open Source

BSD license

Open Source

commercial license 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

Java, Clojure

C, Java, C++ (depending on the Berkeley DB edition)

Server operating systems

hosted

All OS with a Java VM

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

AIX
Android
FreeBSD
iOS
Linux
OS X
Solaris
VxWorks
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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.

yes

only with the Berkeley DB XML edition

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL interfaced based on SQLite is available

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Clojure
Java

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

.Net

Figaro is a .Net framework assembly that extends Berkeley DB XML into an embeddable database engine for .NET
others

Third-party libraries to manipulate Berkeley DB files are available for many languages
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party binding
Perl
Python
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Transaction Functions

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

By using transaction functions

yes

only for the SQL API

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

But extensive use of caching in the application peers

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

none

But extensive use of caching in the application peers

none

Repcached, a Memcached patch, provides this functionallity

Source-replica replication

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

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

using external storage systems (e.g. Cassandra, DynamoDB, PostgreSQL, Couchbase and others)

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

recommended only for testing and development

yes

User concepts

Access control

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

yes

using SASL (Simple Authentication and Security Layer) protocol

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