DBMS > CouchDB vs. etcd vs. Firebird vs. Milvus vs. MongoDB

System Properties Comparison CouchDB vs. etcd vs. Firebird vs. Milvus vs. MongoDB

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 reliable key-value store

Firebird is an open source RDBMS forked from Borland's InterBase

A DBMS designed for efficient storage of vector data and vector similarity searches

One of the most popular document stores available both as a fully managed cloud service and for deployment on self-managed infrastructure

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

Spatial DBMS
Search engine

integrated Lucene index, currently in MongoDB Atlas only.
Time Series DBMS

Time Series Collections introduced in Release 5.0
Vector DBMS

currently available in the MongoDB Atlas cloud service only

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

Score	10.26
Rank	#45	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	7.64
Rank	#54	Overall
	#5	Key-value stores

Score	21.06
Rank	#31	Overall
	#19	Relational DBMS

Score	1.81
Rank	#144	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Score	423.96
Rank	#5	Overall
	#1	Document stores

Website

couchdb.apache.org

etcd.io
github.com/etcd-io/etcd

www.firebirdsql.org

milvus.io

www.mongodb.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

etcd.io/docs
github.com/etcd-io/etcd/tree/master/Documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

www.mongodb.com/docs/manual

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

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

Firebird Foundation

MongoDB, Inc

Initial release

2005

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2019

2009

Current release

3.3.3, December 2023

3.4, August 2019

5.0.0, January 2024

2.3.4, January 2024

6.0.7, June 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

MongoDB Inc.'s Server Side Public License v1. Prior versions were published under GNU AGPL v3.0. Commercial licenses are also available.

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

MongoDB available as DBaaS (MongoDB Atlas)

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

MongoDB Atlas: Global multi-cloud database with unmatched data distribution and mobility across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, built-in automation for resource and workload optimization, and so much more.

Implementation language

Erlang

C and C++

C++, Go

C++

Server operating systems

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
Windows

experimental

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Although schema-free, documents of the same collection often follow the same structure. Optionally impose all or part of a schema by defining a JSON schema.

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

yes

string, integer, double, decimal, boolean, date, object_id, geospatial

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

Read-only SQL queries via the MongoDB Atlas SQL Interface

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

gRPC
JSON over HTTP

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

RESTful HTTP API

GraphQL
HTTP REST
Prisma
proprietary protocol using JSON

Supported programming languages

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

.Net
C
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Rust
Scala
Tcl

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Actionscript

unofficial driver
C
C#
C++
Clojure

unofficial driver
ColdFusion

unofficial driver
D

unofficial driver
Dart

unofficial driver
Delphi

unofficial driver
Erlang
Go
Groovy

unofficial driver
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Kotlin
Lisp

unofficial driver
Lua

unofficial driver
MatLab

unofficial driver
Perl
PHP
PowerShell

unofficial driver
Prolog

unofficial driver
Python
R

unofficial driver
Ruby
Rust
Scala
Smalltalk

unofficial driver
Swift

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

PSQL

JavaScript

Triggers

yes

yes, watching key changes

yes

in MongoDB Atlas only

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

none

Sharding

Partitioned by hashed, ranged, or zoned sharding keys. Live resharding allows users to change their shard keys as an online operation with zero downtime.

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Using Raft consensus algorithm to ensure data replication with strong consistency among multiple replicas.

Source-replica replication

Multi-Source deployments with MongoDB Atlas Global Clusters
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Eventual Consistency

can be individually decided for each read operation
Immediate Consistency

default behaviour

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

typically not used, however similar functionality with DBRef possible

Transaction concepts

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

atomic operations within a single document possible

ACID

Multi-document ACID Transactions with snapshot isolation

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

yes

Features a multi-generational MVCC architecture, readers do not block writers

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

optional, enabled by default

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

In-memory storage engine introduced with MongoDB version 3.2

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per database

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

Access rights for users and roles

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Milvus is an open-source and cloud-native vector database built for production-ready...
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MongoDB provides an integrated suite of cloud database and data services to accelerate...
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Competitive advantages

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
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Built around the flexible document data model and unified API, MongoDB is a developer...
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Typical application scenarios

RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
» more

AI-enriched intelligent apps (Continental, Telefonica, Iron Mountain) Internet of...
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Key customers

Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
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ADP, Adobe, Amadeus, AstraZeneca, Auto Trader, Barclays, BBVA, Bosch, Cisco, CERN,...
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Market metrics

As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
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Hundreds of millions downloads, over 150,000+ Atlas clusters provisioned every month...
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Licensing and pricing models

Milvus was released under the open-source Apache License 2.0 in October 2019. Fully-managed...
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MongoDB database server: Server-Side Public License (SSPL) . Commercial licenses...
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