DBMS > CouchDB vs. MySQL vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison CouchDB vs. MySQL vs. Sphinx

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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.

Widely used open source RDBMS

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

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	10.26
Rank	#45	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	1087.72
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	6.03
Rank	#60	Overall
	#6	Search engines

Website

couchdb.apache.org

www.mysql.com

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

dev.mysql.com/doc

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

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

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2005

1995

2001

Current release

3.3.3, December 2023

8.3.0, January 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

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Implementation language

Erlang

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

FreeBSD
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

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

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

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

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

yes

proprietary syntax

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

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

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

Transaction concepts

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

atomic operations within a single document possible

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: 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

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