DBMS > CouchDB vs. LevelDB vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Realm vs. SpaceTime

System Properties Comparison CouchDB vs. LevelDB vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Realm vs. SpaceTime

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.

Embeddable fast key-value storage library that provides an ordered mapping from string keys to string values

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

A DBMS built for use on mobile devices that’s a fast, easy to use alternative to SQLite and Core Data

SpaceTime is a spatio-temporal DBMS with a focus on performance.

Primary database model

Document store

Key-value store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Document store

Spatial DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	9.30
Rank	#45	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	2.35
Rank	#111	Overall
	#19	Key-value stores

Score	29.04
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	7.60
Rank	#52	Overall
	#9	Document stores

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#7	Spatial DBMS

Website

couchdb.apache.org

github.com/google/leveldb

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

realm.io

www.mireo.com/spacetime

Technical documentation

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

github.com/google/leveldb/blob/main/doc/index.md

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

realm.io/docs

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

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

Google

Microsoft

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

Mireo

Initial release

2005

2011

2014

2020

Current release

3.3.3, December 2023

1.23, February 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

BSD

commercial

Open Source

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

Erlang

C++

Server operating systems

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Illumos
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Android
Backend: server-less
iOS
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

via views

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

A subset of ANSI SQL is implemented

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

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

C++
Go
Java

3rd party binding
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party binding
Python

3rd party binding

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

.Net
Java

with Android only
Objective-C
React Native
Swift

C#
C++
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

JavaScript

runs within the applications so server-side scripts are unnecessary

Triggers

yes

JavaScript

yes

Change Listeners

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

Fixed-grid hypercubes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

Real-time block device replication (DRBD)

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

Transaction concepts

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

atomic operations within a single document possible

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

with automatic compression on writes

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

In-Memory realm

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per database

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

yes

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