DBMS > CouchDB vs. Google Cloud Bigtable vs. Google Cloud Datastore vs. PouchDB vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison CouchDB vs. Google Cloud Bigtable vs. Google Cloud Datastore vs. PouchDB vs. Snowflake

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.

Google's NoSQL Big Data database service. It's the same database that powers many core Google services, including Search, Analytics, Maps, and Gmail.

Automatically scaling NoSQL Database as a Service (DBaaS) on the Google Cloud Platform

JavaScript DBMS with an API inspired by CouchDB

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Primary database model

Document store

Key-value store
Wide column store

Document store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

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

Score	10.26
Rank	#45	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	3.58
Rank	#92	Overall
	#14	Key-value stores
	#8	Wide column stores

Score	4.49
Rank	#79	Overall
	#12	Document stores

Score	2.35
Rank	#116	Overall
	#22	Document stores

Score	123.20
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

couchdb.apache.org

cloud.google.com/bigtable

cloud.google.com/datastore

pouchdb.com

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs

cloud.google.com/datastore/docs

pouchdb.com/guides

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

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

Google

Apache Software Foundation

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2005

2015

2008

2012

2014

Current release

3.3.3, December 2023

7.1.1, June 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

commercial

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

JavaScript

Server operating systems

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes, details here

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

via views

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language (GQL)

yes

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
HappyBase (Python library)
HBase compatible API (Java)

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

HTTP REST

only for PouchDB Server
JavaScript API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

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

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

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

JavaScript

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

using Google App Engine

View functions in JavaScript

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

Callbacks using the Google Apps Engine

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

Sharding

with a proxy-based framework, named couchdb-lounge

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Internal replication in Colossus, and regional replication between two clusters in different zones

Multi-source replication using Paxos

Multi-source replication

also with CouchDB databases
Source-replica replication

also with CouchDB databases

yes

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 (for a single cluster), Eventual consistency (for two or more replicated clusters)

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on type of query and configuration

Strong Consistency is default for entity lookups and queries within an Entity Group (but can instead be made eventually consistent). Other queries are always eventual consistent.

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

via ReferenceProperties or Ancestor paths

yes

Transaction concepts

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

atomic operations within a single document possible

Atomic single-row operations

ACID

Serializable Isolation within Transactions, Read Committed outside of Transactions

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using IndexedDB, WebSQL or LevelDB as backend

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

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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