DBMS > Citus vs. Couchbase vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Snowflake vs. TerarkDB

System Properties Comparison Citus vs. Couchbase vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Snowflake vs. TerarkDB

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

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

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

A key-value store forked from RocksDB with advanced compression algorithms. It can be used standalone or as a storage engine for MySQL and MongoDB

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Key-value 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

Spatial DBMS

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	29.04
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#60	Key-value stores

Website

www.citusdata.com

www.couchbase.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

www.snowflake.com

github.com/bytedance/terarkdb

Technical documentation

docs.citusdata.com

docs.couchbase.com

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

bytedance.larkoffice.com/docs/doccnZmYFqHBm06BbvYgjsHHcKc

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

ByteDance, originally Terark

Initial release

2010

2011

2014

2016

Current release

8.1, December 2018

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

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

Open Source

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

commercial

restricted open source version available

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++, Go and Erlang

C++

Server operating systems

Linux

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

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

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

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

Secondary indexes

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

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

yes

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

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

C++ API
Java 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

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++
Java

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++

JavaScript

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

JavaScript

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

none

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

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

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

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 can be defined down to the item level

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

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