DBMS > CouchDB vs. OpenSearch vs. PouchDB vs. Sphinx vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison CouchDB vs. OpenSearch vs. PouchDB vs. Sphinx vs. TimescaleDB

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 distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine forked from Elasticsearch and based on Apache Lucene

JavaScript DBMS with an API inspired by CouchDB

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

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	8.30
Rank	#47	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	16.03
Rank	#37	Overall
	#4	Search engines

Score	2.34
Rank	#112	Overall
	#21	Document stores

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	4.46
Rank	#71	Overall
	#5	Time Series DBMS

Website

couchdb.apache.org

github.com/opensearch-project
opensearch.org

pouchdb.com

sphinxsearch.com

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

opensearch.org/docs/latest

pouchdb.com/guides

sphinxsearch.com/docs

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

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

Amazon Web Services

Apache Software Foundation

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Timescale

Initial release

2005

2021

2012

2001

2017

Current release

3.3.3, December 2023

2.5.0, January 2023

7.1.1, June 2019

3.5.1, February 2023

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

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Implementation language

Erlang

Java

JavaScript

C++

Server operating systems

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

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

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

via views

yes

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

HTTP REST

only for PouchDB Server
JavaScript API

Proprietary protocol

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

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

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

Elasticsearch client

JavaScript

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

yes

View functions in JavaScript

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

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

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

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

none

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

Eventual 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

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

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

yes

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

OpenSearch is a highly scalable and extensible open-source software suite for search,...
» more

Competitive advantages

Distributed as fully open source under Apache License, Version 2.0 (ALv2), OpenSearch...
» more

Typical application scenarios

The OpenSearch platform is used across a broad range of search , analytics, and observability...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

The OpenSearch Project offers open source software licensed under Apache License...
» more

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