DBMS > CouchDB vs. IBM Cloudant vs. MariaDB vs. PouchDB vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison CouchDB vs. IBM Cloudant vs. MariaDB vs. PouchDB vs. Weaviate

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.

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

MySQL application compatible open source RDBMS, enhanced with high availability, security, interoperability and performance capabilities. MariaDB ColumnStore provides a column-oriented storage engine and MariaDB Xpand supports distributed SQL.

JavaScript DBMS with an API inspired by CouchDB

An AI-native realtime vector database engine that integrates scalable machine learning models.

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

Document store
Graph DBMS

with OQGraph storage engine
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	8.30
Rank	#47	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	2.75
Rank	#104	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Score	91.04
Rank	#13	Overall
	#9	Relational DBMS

Score	2.34
Rank	#112	Overall
	#21	Document stores

Score	1.52
Rank	#153	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Website

couchdb.apache.org

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

pouchdb.com

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

pouchdb.com/guides

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

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

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

MariaDB Corporation Ab (MariaDB Enterprise),
MariaDB Foundation (community MariaDB Server)

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

Apache Software Foundation

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2005

2010

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

2012

2019

Current release

3.3.3, December 2023

11.3.2, February 2024

7.1.1, June 2019

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription available

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate Enterprise

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.

STACKIT MariaDB offers MariaDB in a fully managed version in enterprise grade, 100% GDPR-compliant.

Implementation language

Erlang

C and C++

JavaScript

Server operating systems

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

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

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

schema-free

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, int, float, geo point, date, cross reference, fuzzy references

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

yes

all data objects are indexed in a semantic vector space (the Contextionary), all primitive fields are indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

with proprietary extensions

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

HTTP REST

only for PouchDB Server
JavaScript API

GraphQL query language
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

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

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

JavaScript

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

yes

PL/SQL compatibility added with version 10.3

View functions in JavaScript

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

Sharding

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

Sharding

with a proxy-based framework, named couchdb-lounge

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

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

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

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

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

yes

Optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

not for in-memory storage engine

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

with MEMORY storage engine

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per database

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

MariaDB is the most powerful open source relational database – modern SQL and JSON...
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Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
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Competitive advantages

MariaDB Servers have many features unavailable in other open source relational databases....
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Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
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Typical application scenarios

Web, SaaS and Cloud operational applications that require high availability, scalability...
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As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
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Key customers

Deutsche Bank, DBS Bank, Nasdaq, Red Hat, ServiceNow, Verizon and Walgreens Featured...
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All companies that have data.
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Market metrics

MariaDB is the default database in the LAMP stack supplied by Red Hat and SUSE Linux,...
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As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
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Licensing and pricing models

MariaDB plc subscriptions cover our free, open source database, Community Server,...
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Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
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