DBMS > BigchainDB vs. Citus vs. Couchbase vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Postgres-XL

System Properties Comparison BigchainDB vs. Citus vs. Couchbase vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Postgres-XL

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

BigchainDB is scalable blockchain database offering decentralization, immutability and native assets

Scalable hybrid operational and analytics RDBMS for big data use cases based on PostgreSQL

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

Based on PostgreSQL enhanced with MPP and write-scale-out cluster features

Primary database model

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

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	0.85
Rank	#208	Overall
	#35	Document stores

Score	2.15
Rank	#117	Overall
	#56	Relational DBMS

Score	16.59
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	2.75
Rank	#104	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Score	0.53
Rank	#254	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Website

www.bigchaindb.com

www.citusdata.com

www.couchbase.com

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

www.postgres-xl.org

Technical documentation

bigchaindb.readthedocs.io/en/latest

docs.citusdata.com

docs.couchbase.com

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Initial release

2016

2010

2011

2010

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

Current release

8.1, December 2018

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

10 R1, October 2018

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

AGPL v3

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

Open Source

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

commercial

Open Source

Mozilla public license

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

Python

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Erlang

Server operating systems

Linux

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
macOS

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.

yes

specific XML type available, but no XML query functionality

yes

XML type, but no XML query functionality

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

standard, with numerous extensions

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

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

APIs and other access methods

CLI Client
RESTful HTTP API

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

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

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

Supported programming languages

Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Erlang
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

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

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

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

MVCC

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes,with MongoDB ord RethinkDB

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

Ephemeral buckets

User concepts

Access control

yes

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

Access rights for users can be defined per database

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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