DBMS > Apache Drill vs. Couchbase vs. mSQL vs. ScyllaDB vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Apache Drill vs. Couchbase vs. mSQL vs. ScyllaDB vs. Sphinx

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Schema-free SQL Query Engine for Hadoop, NoSQL and Cloud Storage

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

mSQL (Mini SQL) is a simple and lightweight RDBMS

Cassandra and DynamoDB compatible wide column store

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Primary database model

Document store
Relational DBMS

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

Key-value store

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

Score	1.95
Rank	#127	Overall
	#23	Document stores
	#60	Relational DBMS

Score	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	1.27
Rank	#167	Overall
	#77	Relational DBMS

Score	4.75
Rank	#68	Overall
	#5	Wide column stores

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

drill.apache.org

www.couchbase.com

hughestech.com.au/products/msql

www.scylladb.com

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

drill.apache.org/docs

docs.couchbase.com

docs.scylladb.com

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Couchbase, Inc.

Hughes Technologies

ScyllaDB

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2012

2011

1994

2015

2001

Current release

1.20.3, January 2023

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

4.4, October 2021

ScyllaDB Open Source 5.4.1, January 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

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

commercial

free licenses can be provided

Open Source

Open Source (AGPL), commercial license available

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Scylla Cloud: Create real-time applications that run at global scale with Scylla Cloud, the industry’s most powerful NoSQL DBaaS

Implementation language

C, C++, Go and Erlang

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

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

Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

cluster global secondary indices

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL SELECT statement is SQL:2003 compliant

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

A subset of ANSI SQL is implemented

no subqueries, aggregate functions, views, foreign keys, triggers

SQL-like DML and DDL statements (CQL)

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

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

JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol (CQL)

compatible with CQL (Cassandra Query Language, an SQL-like language)
RESTful HTTP API (DynamoDB compatible)
Thrift

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

C++

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C
C++
Delphi
Java
Perl
PHP
Tcl

For CQL interface: C#, C++, Clojure, Erlang, Go, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Node.js, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, Scala
For DynamoDB interface: .Net, ColdFusion, Erlang, Groovy, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

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

yes, Lua

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Automatic Sharding

none

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

none

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

none

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

none

Eventual Consistency
Tunable Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

Depending on the underlying data source

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

In-memory capabilities

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

Depending on the underlying data source

yes

Ephemeral buckets

yes

in-memory tables

User concepts

Access control

Depending on the underlying data source

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

Access rights for users can be defined per object

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

ScyllaDB is engineered to deliver predictable performance at scale. It’s adopted...
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Competitive advantages

Highly-performant (efficiently utilizes full resources of a node and network; millions...
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Typical application scenarios

ScyllaDB is ideal for applications that require high throughput and low latency at...
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Key customers

Discord, Epic Games, Expedia, Zillow, Comcast, Disney+ Hotstar, Samsung, ShareChat,...
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Market metrics

ScyllaDB typically offers ~75% total cost of ownership savings, with ~5X higher throughput...
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Licensing and pricing models

ScyllaDB Open Source - free open source software (AGPL) ScyllaDB Enterprise - subscription-based...
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