DBMS > CouchDB vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. NuoDB vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison CouchDB vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. NuoDB 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.

Search-as-a-service for web and mobile app development

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

NuoDB is a webscale distributed database that supports SQL and ACID transactions

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

Primary database model

Document store

Search engine

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	8.30
Rank	#47	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	5.52
Rank	#59	Overall
	#6	Search engines

Score	27.71
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	0.94
Rank	#197	Overall
	#92	Relational DBMS

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

couchdb.apache.org

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/search

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

www.3ds.com/nuodb-distributed-sql-database

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

doc.nuodb.com

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

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

Microsoft

Dassault Systèmes

originally NuoDB, Inc.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2005

2015

2014

2013

2001

Current release

3.3.3, December 2023

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

limited edition free

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

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

hosted

Amazon EC2, Windows Azure, SoftLayer
Linux
OS X
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

RESTful HTTP API

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

ADO.NET
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
Python

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

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
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

JavaScript

Java, SQL

Triggers

yes

JavaScript

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

data is dynamically stored/cached on the nodes where it is read/written

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

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Managed transparently by NuoDB

none

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

yes

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

tunable commit protocol

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

yes

MVCC

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

Temporary table

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per database

yes

using Azure authentication

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

Standard SQL roles/ privileges, Administrative Users

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