DBMS > CouchDB vs. PouchDB vs. Realm vs. SQLite

System Properties Comparison CouchDB vs. PouchDB vs. Realm vs. SQLite

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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.

JavaScript DBMS with an API inspired by CouchDB

A DBMS built for use on mobile devices that’s a fast, easy to use alternative to SQLite and Core Data

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

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

Score	9.30
Rank	#45	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	2.28
Rank	#115	Overall
	#21	Document stores

Score	7.60
Rank	#52	Overall
	#9	Document stores

Score	114.32
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

pouchdb.com/guides

realm.io/docs

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

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

Apache Software Foundation

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Initial release

2005

2012

2014

2000

Current release

3.3.3, December 2023

7.1.1, June 2019

3.45.3 (15 April 2024), April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Public Domain

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.

Implementation language

Erlang

JavaScript

Server operating systems

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

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

Android
Backend: server-less
iOS
Windows

server-less

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

dynamic column types

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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

via views

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

HTTP REST

only for PouchDB Server
JavaScript API

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

Supported programming languages

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

JavaScript

.Net
Java

with Android only
Objective-C
React Native
Swift

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

runs within the applications so server-side scripts are unnecessary

Triggers

yes

Change Listeners

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

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication

also with CouchDB databases
Source-replica replication

also with CouchDB databases

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

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

via file-system locks

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

In-Memory realm

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per database

yes

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