DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. Realm vs. TimesTen

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. Realm vs. TimesTen

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Widely used in-process key-value store

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

In-Memory RDBMS compatible to Oracle

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Document store

Key-value store

supports sorted and unsorted key sets
Native XML DBMS

in the Oracle Berkeley DB XML version

Document store

Relational 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	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	2.21
Rank	#117	Overall
	#20	Key-value stores
	#3	Native XML DBMS

Score	7.60
Rank	#52	Overall
	#9	Document stores

Score	1.31
Rank	#163	Overall
	#74	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

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

realm.io

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

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

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

realm.io/docs

docs.oracle.com/database/timesten-18.1

Developer

Amazon

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Oracle

originally developed by Sleepycat, which was acquired by Oracle

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

Oracle, TimesTen Performance Software, HP

originally founded in HP Labs it was acquired by Oracle in 2005

Initial release

2012

2010

1994

2014

1998

Current release

18.1.40, May 2020

11 Release 2 (11.2.2.8.0)

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

commercial

Open Source

commercial license available

Open Source

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

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

Server operating systems

hosted

AIX
Android
FreeBSD
iOS
Linux
OS X
Solaris
VxWorks
Windows

Android
Backend: server-less
iOS
Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris SPARC/x86
Windows

Data scheme

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

only with the Berkeley DB XML edition

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL interfaced based on SQLite is available

yes

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

JDBC
ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
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

.Net
Java

with Android only
Objective-C
React Native
Swift

C
C++
Java
PL/SQL

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

runs within the applications so server-side scripts are unnecessary

PL/SQL

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes

only for the SQL API

yes

Change Listeners

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication

none

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

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

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

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

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by means of logfiles and checkpoints

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

In-Memory realm

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

yes

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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