DBMS > CouchDB vs. Microsoft Azure Table Storage vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Neo4j vs. PouchDB

System Properties Comparison CouchDB vs. Microsoft Azure Table Storage vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Neo4j vs. PouchDB

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.

A Wide Column Store for rapid development using massive semi-structured datasets

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Scalable, ACID-compliant graph database designed with a high-performance distributed cluster architecture, available in self-hosted and cloud offerings

JavaScript DBMS with an API inspired by CouchDB

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

Document store
Graph 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	4.04
Rank	#77	Overall
	#6	Wide column stores

Score	821.56
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	2.34
Rank	#112	Overall
	#21	Document stores

Website

couchdb.apache.org

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/storage/tables

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

neo4j.com

pouchdb.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

neo4j.com/docs

pouchdb.com/guides

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

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

Microsoft

Neo4j, Inc.

Apache Software Foundation

Initial release

2005

2012

1989

2007

2012

Current release

3.3.3, December 2023

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

5.20, May 2024

7.1.1, June 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

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Neo4j Aura: Neo4j’s fully managed cloud service: The zero-admin, always-on graph database for cloud developers.

Implementation language

Erlang

C++

Java, Scala

JavaScript

Server operating systems

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Linux
Windows

Linux

Can also be used server-less as embedded Java database.
OS X
Solaris
Windows

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

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

schema-free

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

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

via views

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

HTTP REST

only for PouchDB Server
JavaScript API

Supported programming languages

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

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

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

.Net
Clojure
Elixir
Go
Groovy
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

JavaScript

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

View functions in JavaScript

Triggers

yes

via event handler

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

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Sharding

with a proxy-based framework, named couchdb-lounge

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

implicit feature of the cloud service. Replication either local, cross-facility or geo-redundant.

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

Multi-source replication

also with CouchDB databases
Source-replica replication

also with CouchDB databases

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

Causal and Eventual Consistency configurable in Causal Cluster setup
Immediate Consistency in stand-alone mode

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

atomic operations within a single document possible

optimistic locking

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

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

Access rights based on private key authentication or shared access signatures

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users, roles and permissions. Pluggable authentication with supported standards (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos)

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Market metrics

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Licensing and pricing models

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