DBMS > Couchbase vs. CouchDB vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Splunk

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. CouchDB vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Splunk

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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.

Cloud-hosted realtime document store. iOS, Android, and JavaScript clients share one Realtime Database instance and automatically receive updates with the newest data.

A horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service. It is the externalization of the core Google database that runs the biggest aspects of Google, like Ads and Google Play.

Analytics Platform for Big Data

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

Search engine

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

using the Geocouch extension

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

Score	16.59
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	8.30
Rank	#47	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	13.64
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	2.84
Rank	#100	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Score	89.10
Rank	#14	Overall
	#2	Search engines

Website

www.couchbase.com

couchdb.apache.org

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.splunk.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

firebase.google.com/docs/database

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Apache Software Foundation

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

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Google

Splunk Inc.

Initial release

2011

2005

2012

2017

2003

Current release

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

3.3.3, December 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Limited free edition and free developer edition 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

Erlang

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

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

via views

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

Splunk Search Processing Language for search commands

APIs and other access methods

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

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

HTTP REST

Supported programming languages

.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

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C#
Java
JavaScript
PHP
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

View functions in JavaScript

limited functionality with using 'rules'

yes

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

Multi-source replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integrity

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

atomic operations within a single document possible

yes

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

A 'Transaction' in Splunk has a different meaning: grouping related events into a single one for later searching

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

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

User concepts

Access control

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

Access rights for users can be defined per database

yes, based on authentication and database rules

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Access rights for users and roles

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