DBMS > CouchDB vs. Drizzle vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. RethinkDB vs. SwayDB

System Properties Comparison CouchDB vs. Drizzle vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. RethinkDB vs. SwayDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Drizzle has published its last release in September 2012. The open-source project is discontinued and Drizzle is excluded from the DB-Engines ranking.

Description

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

MySQL fork with a pluggable micro-kernel and with an emphasis of performance over compatibility.

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

DBMS for the Web with a mechanism to push updated query results to applications in realtime.

An embeddable, non-blocking, type-safe key-value store for single or multiple disks and in-memory storage

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	10.26
Rank	#45	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	15.00
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	2.84
Rank	#106	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Score	0.04
Rank	#373	Overall
	#57	Key-value stores

Website

couchdb.apache.org

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

rethinkdb.com

swaydb.simer.au

Technical documentation

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

firebase.google.com/docs/database

rethinkdb.com/docs

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

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

Drizzle project, originally started by Brian Aker

Google

acquired by Google 2014

The Linux Foundation

since July 2017

Simer Plaha

Initial release

2005

2008

2012

2009

2018

Current release

3.3.3, December 2023

7.2.4, September 2012

2.4.1, August 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

GNU GPL

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

GNU Affero GPL V3.0

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

Erlang

C++

Scala

Server operating systems

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, binary, float, bool, date, geometry

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

via views

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

with proprietary extensions

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

JDBC

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

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

C
C++
Java
PHP

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

community-supported driver
C#

community-supported driver
C++

community-supported driver
Clojure

community-supported driver
Dart

community-supported driver
Erlang

community-supported driver
Go

community-supported driver
Haskell

community-supported driver
Java

official driver
JavaScript (Node.js)

official driver
Lisp

community-supported driver
Lua

community-supported driver
Objective-C

community-supported driver
Perl

community-supported driver
PHP

community-supported driver
Python

official driver
Ruby

official driver
Scala

community-supported driver

Java
Kotlin
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

limited functionality with using 'rules'

Triggers

yes

hooks for callbacks inside the server can be used.

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

Client-side triggers through changefeeds

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

Sharding

range based

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

atomic operations within a single document possible

ACID

yes

Atomic single-document operations

Atomic execution of operations

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

yes

MVCC based

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

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per database

Pluggable authentication mechanisms

e.g. LDAP, HTTP

yes, based on authentication and database rules

yes

users and table-level permissions

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