DBMS > CouchDB vs. IBM Cloudant vs. MySQL vs. SAP SQL Anywhere vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison CouchDB vs. IBM Cloudant vs. MySQL vs. SAP SQL Anywhere vs. Sphinx

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

Widely used open source RDBMS

RDBMS database and synchronization technologies for server, desktop, remote office, and mobile environments

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Relational DBMS

Search engine

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	2.75
Rank	#104	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Score	1061.34
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	3.95
Rank	#80	Overall
	#42	Relational DBMS

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

couchdb.apache.org

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

www.mysql.com

www.sap.com/products/technology-platform/sql-anywhere.html

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

dev.mysql.com/doc

help.sap.com/docs/SAP_SQL_Anywhere

sphinxsearch.com/docs

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

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

SAP

formerly Sybase

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2005

2010

1995

1992

2001

Current release

3.3.3, December 2023

8.4.0, April 2024

17, July 2015

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

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++

Server operating systems

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

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

Secondary indexes

yes

via views

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

ADO.NET
HTTP API
JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

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

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

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

yes

proprietary syntax

yes, in C/C++, Java, .Net or Perl

Triggers

yes

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

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication

Database mirroring

none

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

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

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

yes

Optimistic locking

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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