DBMS > ClickHouse vs. Couchbase vs. MariaDB vs. RavenDB vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. Couchbase vs. MariaDB vs. RavenDB vs. Sphinx

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A high-performance, column-oriented SQL DBMS for online analytical processing (OLAP) that uses all available system resources to their full potential to process each analytical query as fast as possible. It is available as both an open-source software and a cloud offering.

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

MySQL application compatible open source RDBMS, enhanced with high availability, security, interoperability and performance capabilities. MariaDB ColumnStore provides a column-oriented storage engine and MariaDB Xpand supports distributed SQL.

Open Source Operational and Transactional Enterprise NoSQL Document Database

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

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
Graph DBMS

with OQGraph storage engine
Spatial DBMS

Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

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

Score	15.55
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	16.59
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	91.04
Rank	#13	Overall
	#9	Relational DBMS

Score	2.84
Rank	#101	Overall
	#18	Document stores

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

clickhouse.com

www.couchbase.com

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

ravendb.net

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

docs.couchbase.com

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

ravendb.net/docs

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

Couchbase, Inc.

MariaDB Corporation Ab (MariaDB Enterprise),
MariaDB Foundation (community MariaDB Server)

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

Hibernating Rhinos

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2016

2011

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

2010

2001

Current release

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

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

11.3.2, February 2024

5.4, July 2022

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

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

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription available

Open Source

AGPL version 3, commercial license available

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

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.

Aiven for Clickhouse: Managed cloud data warehousing with high-speed analytics.
ClickHouse Cloud: Get the performance you love from open source ClickHouse in a serverless offering that takes care of the details so you can spend more time getting insight out of the fastest database on earth.
DoubleCloud: Fully managed ClickHouse alongside best-in-class managed open-source services to build analytics at scale.

STACKIT MariaDB offers MariaDB in a fully managed version in enterprise grade, 100% GDPR-compliant.

Implementation language

C++

C, C++, Go and Erlang

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

Linux
OS X
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

Linux
macOS
Raspberry Pi
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

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

Secondary indexes

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

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

yes

with proprietary extensions

SQL-like query language (RQL)

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

gRPC
HTTP REST
JDBC
MySQL wire protocol
ODBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol
Proprietary protocol

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

.NET Client API
F# Client API
Go Client API
Java Client API
NodeJS Client API
PHP Client API
Python Client API
RESTful HTTP API

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

3rd party library
C++
Elixir

3rd party library
Go

3rd party library
Java

3rd party library
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party library
Kotlin

3rd party library
Nim

3rd party library
Perl

3rd party library
PHP

3rd party library
Python

3rd party library
R

3rd party library
Ruby

3rd party library
Rust
Scala

3rd party library

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Eiffel
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

.Net
C#
F#
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

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

yes

PL/SQL compatibility added with version 10.3

yes

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

key based and custom

Automatic Sharding

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Asynchronous and synchronous physical replication; geographically distributed replicas; support for object storages.

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication

none

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

Immediate Consistency

Default ACID transactions on the local node (eventually consistent across the cluster). Atomic operations with cluster-wide ACID transactions. Eventual consistency for indexes and full-text search indexes.

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID, Cluster-wide transaction available

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

not for in-memory storage engine

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

Ephemeral buckets

yes

with MEMORY storage engine

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users and roles. Column and row based policies. Quotas and resource limits. Pluggable authentication with LDAP and Kerberos. Password based, X.509 certificate, and SSH key authentication.

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Authorization levels configured per client per database

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

MariaDB is the most powerful open source relational database – modern SQL and JSON...
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Competitive advantages

MariaDB Servers have many features unavailable in other open source relational databases....
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Typical application scenarios

Web, SaaS and Cloud operational applications that require high availability, scalability...
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Key customers

Deutsche Bank, DBS Bank, Nasdaq, Red Hat, ServiceNow, Verizon and Walgreens Featured...
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Market metrics

MariaDB is the default database in the LAMP stack supplied by Red Hat and SUSE Linux,...
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Licensing and pricing models

MariaDB plc subscriptions cover our free, open source database, Community Server,...
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