DBMS > Amazon SimpleDB vs. Couchbase vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Realm vs. RocksDB

System Properties Comparison Amazon SimpleDB vs. Couchbase vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Realm vs. RocksDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Hosted simple database service by Amazon, with the data stored in the Amazon Cloud.

There is an unrelated product called SimpleDB developed by Edward Sciore

A distributed document store with integrated cache, a powerful search engine, in-built operational and analytical capabilities, and an embedded mobile database

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

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

Embeddable persistent key-value store optimized for fast storage (flash and RAM)

Primary database model

Key-value store

Document store

Key-value store

Secondary database models

Key-value store

originating from the former Membase product and supporting the Memcached protocol
Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

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

Score	1.88
Rank	#133	Overall
	#23	Key-value stores

Score	16.59
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	2.75
Rank	#104	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Score	7.41
Rank	#52	Overall
	#8	Document stores

Score	3.41
Rank	#86	Overall
	#11	Key-value stores

Website

aws.amazon.com/simpledb

www.couchbase.com

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

realm.io

rocksdb.org

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/simpledb

docs.couchbase.com

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

realm.io/docs

github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki

Developer

Amazon

Couchbase, Inc.

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

Facebook, Inc.

Initial release

2007

2011

2010

2014

2013

Current release

Server: 7.2, June 2023; Mobile: 3.1, March 2022; Couchbase Capella (DBaaS), June 2023

9.2.1, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Business Source License (BSL 1.1); Commercial licenses also available

commercial

Open Source

BSD

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

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Erlang

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Android
Backend: server-less
iOS
Windows

Linux

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

All columns are indexed automatically

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL++, extends ANSI SQL to JSON for operational, transactional, and analytic use cases

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
HTTP REST
Kafka Connector
Native language bindings for CRUD, Query, Search and Analytics APIs
Spark Connector
Spring Data

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

C++ API
Java API

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Erlang
Java
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

.Net
Java

with Android only
Objective-C
React Native
Swift

C
C++
Go
Java
Perl
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Functions and timers in JavaScript and UDFs in Java, Python, SQL++

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

runs within the applications so server-side scripts are unnecessary

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

Change Listeners

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding must be implemented in the application

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

none

horizontal partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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

selectable on a per-operation basis

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

Concurrent data updates can be detected by the application

ACID

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

yes

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

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

Ephemeral buckets

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)

User and Administrator separation with password-based and LDAP integrated Authentication. Role-base access control.

Access rights for users can be defined per database

yes

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