DBMS > Apache Druid vs. Couchbase vs. Elasticsearch vs. Lovefield vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Apache Druid vs. Couchbase vs. Elasticsearch vs. Lovefield vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Open-source analytics data store designed for sub-second OLAP queries on high dimensionality and high cardinality data

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

A distributed, RESTful modern search and analytics engine based on Apache Lucene

Elasticsearch lets you perform and combine many types of searches such as structured, unstructured, geo, and metric

Embeddable relational database for web apps written in pure JavaScript

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Primary database model

Relational DBMS
Time Series DBMS

Document store

Search engine

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

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

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

Score	3.25
Rank	#90	Overall
	#47	Relational DBMS
	#7	Time Series DBMS

Score	16.59
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	132.83
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	0.33
Rank	#286	Overall
	#131	Relational DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

druid.apache.org

www.couchbase.com

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

google.github.io/lovefield

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

druid.apache.org/docs/latest/design

docs.couchbase.com

www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/index.html

github.com/google/lovefield/blob/master/docs/spec_index.md

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation and contributors

Couchbase, Inc.

Elastic

Google

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2012

2011

2010

2014

Current release

29.0.1, April 2024

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

8.6, January 2023

2.1.12, February 2017

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache license v2

Open Source

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

Open Source

Elastic License

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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

Java

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Java

JavaScript

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Unix

Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

tested with Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-less columns are supported

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

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

Secondary indexes

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL for querying

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

SQL-like query language

via JavaScript builder pattern

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Clojure
JavaScript
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scala

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
Groovy
Community Contributed Clients
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

JavaScript

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

Using read-only observers

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

manual/auto, time-based

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

none

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes, via HDFS, S3 or other storage engines

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

yes

none

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

ES-Hadoop Connector

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, by using IndexedDB or the cloud service Firebase Realtime Database

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

Ephemeral buckets

Memcached and Redis integration

yes

using MemoryDB

User concepts

Access control

RBAC using LDAP or Druid internals for users and groups for read/write by datasource and system

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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