DBMS > CouchDB vs. MarkLogic vs. PouchDB vs. Snowflake vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison CouchDB vs. MarkLogic vs. PouchDB vs. Snowflake 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.

Operational and transactional Enterprise NoSQL database

JavaScript DBMS with an API inspired by CouchDB

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

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

Primary database model

Document store

Document store
Native XML DBMS
RDF store

as of version 7
Search engine

Document store

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

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

Score	7.46
Rank	#51	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	4.15
Rank	#70	Overall
	#11	Document stores
	#1	Native XML DBMS
	#1	RDF stores
	#8	Search engines

Score	2.18
Rank	#114	Overall
	#21	Document stores

Score	133.72
Rank	#7	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	1.48
Rank	#149	Overall
	#8	Vector DBMS

Website

couchdb.apache.org

www.progress.com/marklogic

pouchdb.com

www.snowflake.com

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

www.progress.com/marklogic/documentation

pouchdb.com/guides

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

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

MarkLogic Corp.

Apache Software Foundation

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2005

2001

2012

2014

2019

Current release

3.3.3, December 2023

11.0, December 2022

7.1.1, June 2019

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

commercial

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.

Implementation language

Erlang

C++

JavaScript

Server operating systems

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

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

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

Schema can be enforced

schema-free

yes

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

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

SQL92

yes

GraphQL is used as query language

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

HTTP REST

only for PouchDB Server
JavaScript API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

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

JavaScript

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

yes

via XQuery or JavaScript

View functions in JavaScript

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

Sharding

with a proxy-based framework, named couchdb-lounge

yes

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

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

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

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Eventual 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

ACID

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

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 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

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

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
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Competitive advantages

Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
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Typical application scenarios

As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
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Key customers

All companies that have data.
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Market metrics

As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
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Licensing and pricing models

Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
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