DBMS > Apache Impala vs. Couchbase vs. Fauna vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Realm

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. Couchbase vs. Fauna vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Realm

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

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

Fauna provides a web-native interface, with support for GraphQL and custom business logic that integrates seamlessly with the rest of the serverless ecosystem. The underlying globally distributed storage and compute platform is fast, consistent, and reliable, with a modern security infrastructure.

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Relational DBMS
Time Series DBMS

Document store

Secondary database models

Document store

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	13.77
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	1.52
Rank	#153	Overall
	#26	Document stores
	#14	Graph DBMS
	#71	Relational DBMS
	#13	Time Series DBMS

Score	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	7.60
Rank	#52	Overall
	#9	Document stores

Website

impala.apache.org

www.couchbase.com

fauna.com

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

realm.io

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

docs.couchbase.com

docs.fauna.com

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

realm.io/docs

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Couchbase, Inc.

Fauna, Inc.

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

Initial release

2013

2011

2014

2010

2014

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

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

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

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

commercial

Open Source

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, C++, Go and Erlang

Scala

Erlang

Server operating systems

Linux

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Android
Backend: server-less
iOS
Windows

Data scheme

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

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

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

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

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

RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C#
Go
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby
Scala
Swift

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

.Net
Java

with Android only
Objective-C
React Native
Swift

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

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

user defined functions

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

Sharding

Automatic Sharding

horizontal partitioning

consistent hashing

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

query execution via MapReduce

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

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

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users, groups and roles

based on Apache Sentry and Kerberos

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

Identity management, authentication, and access control

Access rights for users can be defined per database

yes

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