DBMS > Apache IoTDB vs. Couchbase vs. H2 vs. NSDb vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Apache IoTDB vs. Couchbase vs. H2 vs. NSDb vs. TimescaleDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

An IoT native database with high performance for data management and analysis, deployable on the edge and the cloud and integrated with Hadoop, Spark and Flink

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

Full-featured RDBMS with a small footprint, either embedded into a Java application or used as a database server.

Scalable, High-performance Time Series DBMS designed for Real-time Analytics on top of Kubernetes

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

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

Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	1.18
Rank	#173	Overall
	#15	Time Series DBMS

Score	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	8.13
Rank	#49	Overall
	#31	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#41	Time Series DBMS

Score	4.64
Rank	#71	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

iotdb.apache.org/UserGuide/Master/QuickStart/QuickStart.html

docs.couchbase.com

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

nsdb.io/Architecture

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Couchbase, Inc.

Thomas Mueller

Timescale

Initial release

2018

2011

2005

2017

Current release

1.1.0, April 2023

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

2.2.220, July 2023

2.13.0, November 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

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

Open Source

dual-licence (Mozilla public license, Eclipse public license)

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

Java

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Java

Java, Scala

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM (>= 1.8)

Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
macOS

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes: int, bigint, decimal, string

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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 fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

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

yes

SQL-like query language

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
Native API

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

JDBC
ODBC

gRPC
HTTP REST
WebSocket

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Go
Java
Python
Scala

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java

Java
Scala

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

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

Java Stored Procedures and User-Defined Functions

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

horizontal partitioning (by time range) + vertical partitioning (by deviceId)

Automatic Sharding

none

Sharding

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication methods; using Raft/IoTConsensus algorithm to ensure strong/eventual data consistency among multiple replicas

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

With clustering: 2 database servers on different computers operate on identical copies of a database

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Integration with Hadoop and Spark

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Strong Consistency with Raft

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

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Using Apache Lucene

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

Ephemeral buckets

yes

User concepts

Access control

yes

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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