DBMS > CouchDB vs. Elasticsearch vs. MySQL vs. Sphinx vs. VoltDB

System Properties Comparison CouchDB vs. Elasticsearch vs. MySQL vs. Sphinx vs. VoltDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

A distributed, RESTful modern search and analytics engine based on Apache Lucene

Elasticsearch lets you perform and combine many types of searches such as structured, unstructured, geo, and metric

Widely used open source RDBMS

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

Distributed In-Memory NewSQL RDBMS

Used for OLTP applications with a high frequency of relatively simple transactions, that can hold all their data in memory

Primary database model

Document store

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	9.30
Rank	#45	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	135.35
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	1083.74
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	1.44
Rank	#158	Overall
	#73	Relational DBMS

Website

couchdb.apache.org

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

www.mysql.com

sphinxsearch.com

www.voltdb.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/index.html

dev.mysql.com/doc

sphinxsearch.com/docs

docs.voltdb.com

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

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

Elastic

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

VoltDB Inc.

Initial release

2005

2010

1995

2001

2010

Current release

3.3.3, December 2023

8.6, January 2023

8.4.0, April 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

11.3, April 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Elastic License

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

AGPL for Community Edition, commercial license for Enterprise, AWS, and Pro Editions

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

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Implementation language

Erlang

Java

C and C++

C++

Java, C++

Server operating systems

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
OS X

for development

Data scheme

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

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

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

with proprietary extensions

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

only a subset of SQL 99

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Proprietary protocol

Java API
JDBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

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

.Net
Groovy
Community Contributed Clients
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

C#
C++
Erlang

not officially supported
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

yes

proprietary syntax

Java

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

Sharding

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

Sharding

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

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

ES-Hadoop Connector

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

FOREIGN KEY constraints are not supported

Transaction concepts

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

atomic operations within a single document possible

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

Transactions are executed single-threaded within stored procedures

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

yes

Data access is serialized by the server

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

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

yes

Snapshots and command logging

In-memory capabilities

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

Memcached and Redis integration

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per database

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

Users and roles with access to stored procedures

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