DBMS > CouchDB vs. IBM Cloudant vs. MarkLogic vs. Redis vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison CouchDB vs. IBM Cloudant vs. MarkLogic vs. Redis 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.

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Operational and transactional Enterprise NoSQL database

Popular in-memory data platform used as a cache, message broker, and database that can be deployed on-premises, across clouds, and hybrid environments

Redis focuses on performance so most of its design decisions prioritize high performance and very low latencies.

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

Primary database model

Document store

Document store
Native XML DBMS
RDF store

as of version 7
Search engine

Key-value store

Multiple data types and a rich set of operations, as well as configurable data expiration, eviction and persistence

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

Document store

with RedisJSON
Graph DBMS

with RedisGraph
Spatial DBMS
Search engine

with RediSearch
Time Series DBMS

with RedisTimeSeries
Vector 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	5.18
Rank	#63	Overall
	#11	Document stores
	#1	Native XML DBMS
	#1	RDF stores
	#7	Search engines

Score	155.94
Rank	#6	Overall
	#1	Key-value stores

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

couchdb.apache.org

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

www.progress.com/marklogic

redis.com
redis.io

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

www.progress.com/marklogic/documentation

docs.redis.com/latest/index.html
redis.io/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

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

MarkLogic Corp.

Redis project core team, inspired by Salvatore Sanfilippo

Development sponsored by Redis Inc.

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2005

2010

2001

2009

2014

Current release

3.3.3, December 2023

11.0, December 2022

7.2.5, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

source-available extensions (modules), commercial licenses for Redis Enterprise

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.

Aiven for Redis: Fully managed in-memory key-value store for all your caching and speedy lookup needs.

Implementation language

Erlang

C++

Server operating systems

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

ported and maintained by Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

Schema can be enforced

schema-free

yes

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

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

partial

Supported data types are strings, hashes, lists, sets and sorted sets, bit arrays, hyperloglogs and geospatial indexes

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

with RediSearch module

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL92

with RediSQL module

yes

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Java API
Node.js Client API
ODBC
proprietary Optic API

Proprietary Query API, introduced with version 9
RESTful HTTP API
SPARQL
WebDAV
XDBC
XQuery
XSLT

proprietary protocol

RESP - REdis Serialization Protocol

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#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C
C#
C++
Clojure
Crystal
D
Dart
Elixir
Erlang
Fancy
Go
Haskell
Haxe
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Pascal
Perl
PHP
Prolog
Pure Data
Python
R
Rebol
Ruby
Rust
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Swift
Tcl
Visual Basic

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

yes

via XQuery or JavaScript

Lua; Redis Functions coming in Redis 7 (slides and Github)

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

publish/subscribe channels provide some trigger functionality; RedisGears

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

Sharding

Automatic hash-based sharding with support for hash-tags for manual sharding

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Multi-source replication

with Redis Enterprise Pack
Source-replica replication

Chained replication is supported

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

via Hadoop Connector, HDFS Direct Access and in-database MapReduce jobs

through RedisGears

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Causal consistency can be enabled in Active-Active databases
Strong consistency with Redis Raft
Strong eventual consistency with Active-Active

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

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

can act as a resource manager in an XA/JTA transaction

Atomic execution of command blocks and scripts and optimistic locking

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

yes

Optimistic locking

yes

Data access is serialized by the server

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Configurable mechanisms for persistency via snapshots and/or operations logs

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes, with Range Indexes

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per database

Role-based access control at the document and subdocument levels

Access Control Lists (ACLs): redis.io/docs/management/security/acl
LDAP and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) for Redis Enterprise
Mutual TLS authentication: redis.io/docs/management/security/encryption
Password-based authentication

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

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