DBMS > Citus vs. Couchbase vs. CouchDB vs. Lovefield vs. PouchDB

System Properties Comparison Citus vs. Couchbase vs. CouchDB vs. Lovefield vs. PouchDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

A native JSON - document store inspired by Lotus Notes, scalable from globally distributed server-clusters down to mobile phones.

Embeddable relational database for web apps written in pure JavaScript

JavaScript DBMS with an API inspired by CouchDB

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

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

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

Score	2.21
Rank	#118	Overall
	#56	Relational DBMS

Score	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	9.30
Rank	#45	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	0.29
Rank	#293	Overall
	#133	Relational DBMS

Score	2.28
Rank	#115	Overall
	#21	Document stores

Website

www.citusdata.com

www.couchbase.com

couchdb.apache.org

google.github.io/lovefield

pouchdb.com

Technical documentation

docs.citusdata.com

docs.couchbase.com

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

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

pouchdb.com/guides

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Damien Katz, a former Lotus Notes developer

Google

Apache Software Foundation

Initial release

2010

2011

2005

2014

2012

Current release

8.1, December 2018

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

3.3.3, December 2023

2.1.12, February 2017

7.1.1, June 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

Open Source

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

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

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.

Implementation language

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Erlang

JavaScript

Server operating systems

Linux

Linux
OS X
Windows

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

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

tested with Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari

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

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free

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

Secondary indexes

yes

via views

yes

via views

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

standard, with numerous extensions

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

SQL-like query language

via JavaScript builder pattern

APIs and other access methods

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

HTTP REST

only for PouchDB Server
JavaScript API

Supported programming languages

.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
C#
ColdFusion
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
Ruby
Smalltalk

JavaScript

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 in JavaScript

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

Using read-only observers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

none

Sharding

with a proxy-based framework, named couchdb-lounge

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

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

none

Multi-source replication

also with CouchDB databases
Source-replica replication

also with CouchDB databases

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

atomic operations within a single document possible

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

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

yes

by using IndexedDB, WebSQL or LevelDB as backend

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

Ephemeral buckets

yes

using MemoryDB

yes

User concepts

Access control

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

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