DBMS > CouchDB vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. MySQL vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. Spark SQL

System Properties Comparison CouchDB vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. MySQL vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. Spark SQL

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 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.

Widely used open source RDBMS

Widely used in-process key-value store

Spark SQL is a component on top of 'Spark Core' for structured data processing

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Key-value store

supports sorted and unsorted key sets
Native XML DBMS

in the Oracle Berkeley DB XML version

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	8.30
Rank	#47	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	2.84
Rank	#100	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Score	1061.34
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	2.01
Rank	#126	Overall
	#21	Key-value stores
	#3	Native XML DBMS

Score	18.04
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Website

couchdb.apache.org

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.mysql.com

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/berkeleydb.html

spark.apache.org/sql

Technical documentation

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

dev.mysql.com/doc

docs.oracle.com/cd/E17076_05/html/index.html

spark.apache.org/docs/latest/sql-programming-guide.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

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

Google

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Oracle

originally developed by Sleepycat, which was acquired by Oracle

Apache Software Foundation

Initial release

2005

2017

1995

1994

2014

Current release

3.3.3, December 2023

8.4.0, April 2024

18.1.40, May 2020

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

Open Source

commercial license available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

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Database as a Service

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Implementation language

Erlang

C and C++

C, Java, C++ (depending on the Berkeley DB edition)

Scala

Server operating systems

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

AIX
Android
FreeBSD
iOS
Linux
OS X
Solaris
VxWorks
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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

only with the Berkeley DB XML edition

Secondary indexes

yes

via views

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

SQL interfaced based on SQLite is available

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

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

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

.Net

Figaro is a .Net framework assembly that extends Berkeley DB XML into an embeddable database engine for .NET
others

Third-party libraries to manipulate Berkeley DB files are available for many languages
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party binding
Perl
Python
Tcl

Java
Python
R
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

yes

proprietary syntax

Triggers

yes

only for the SQL API

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

none

yes, utilizing Spark Core

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

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

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

Transaction concepts

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

atomic operations within a single document possible

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

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

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

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