DBMS > Couchbase vs. CrateDB vs. ObjectBox vs. Sphinx vs. Splice Machine

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. CrateDB vs. ObjectBox vs. Sphinx vs. Splice Machine

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A distributed document store with integrated cache, a powerful search engine, in-built operational and analytical capabilities, and an embedded mobile database

Distributed Database based on Lucene

Extremely fast embedded database for small devices, IoT and Mobile

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

Open-Source SQL RDBMS for Operational and Analytical use cases with native Machine Learning, powered by Hadoop and Spark

Primary database model

Document store

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Object oriented DBMS

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Key-value store

originating from the former Membase product and supporting the Memcached protocol
Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

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

Score	18.46
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	0.73
Rank	#229	Overall
	#37	Document stores
	#5	Spatial DBMS
	#16	Search engines
	#19	Time Series DBMS
	#8	Vector DBMS

Score	1.22
Rank	#172	Overall
	#5	Object oriented DBMS

Score	6.03
Rank	#60	Overall
	#6	Search engines

Score	0.54
Rank	#255	Overall
	#116	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

cratedb.com/docs

docs.objectbox.io

sphinxsearch.com/docs

splicemachine.com/how-it-works

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Crate

ObjectBox Limited

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Splice Machine

Initial release

2011

2013

2017

2001

2014

Current release

Server: 7.2, June 2023; Mobile: 3.1, March 2022; Couchbase Capella (DBaaS), June 2023

3.5.1, February 2023

3.1, March 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Business Source License (BSL 1.1); Commercial licenses also available

Open Source

Apache License 2.0

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

AGPL 3.0, commercial license available

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.

CrateDB Cloud: a distributed SQL database that spreads data and processing across an elastic cluster of shared nothing nodes. CrateDB Cloud enables data insights at scale on Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud Platform.

Implementation language

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Java

C and C++

C++

Java

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

All Operating Systems, including Kubernetes with CrateDB Kubernetes Operator support

Android
iOS
Linux
macOS
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

Flexible Schema (defined schema, partial schema, 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.

Secondary indexes

yes

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL++, extends ANSI SQL to JSON for operational, transactional, and analytic use cases

yes, but no triggers and constraints, and PostgreSQL compatibility

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

APIs and other access methods

CLI Client
HTTP REST
Kafka Connector
Native language bindings for CRUD, Query, Search and Analytics APIs
Spark Connector
Spring Data

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol
Prometheus Remote Read/Write
RESTful HTTP API

Proprietary native API

Proprietary protocol

JDBC
Native Spark Datasource
ODBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.NET
Erlang
Go

community maintained client
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

community maintained client
Perl

community maintained client
PHP
Python
R
Ruby

community maintained client
Scala

community maintained client

C
C++
Dart
Go
Java
JavaScript

planned (as of Jan 2019)
Kotlin
Python

planned (as of Jan 2019)
Swift

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
R
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Functions and timers in JavaScript and UDFs in Java, Python, SQL++

user defined functions (Javascript)

yes

Java

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

none

Sharding

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

Shared Nothhing Auto-Sharding, Columnar Partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Configurable replication on table/partition-level

online/offline synchronization between client and server

none

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Yes, via Full Spark Integration

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Eventual Consistency
Read-after-write consistency on record level

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

unique row identifiers can be used for implementing an optimistic concurrency control strategy

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

Durability

Support for making data persistent

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

Ephemeral buckets

yes

User concepts

Access control

User and Administrator separation with password-based and LDAP integrated Authentication. Role-base access control.

rights management via user accounts

yes

Access rights for users, groups and roles according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

The enterprise database for time series, documents, and vectors. Distributed - Native...
» more

Competitive advantages

Response time in milliseconds: e ven for complex ad-hoc queries. Massive scaling...
» more

Typical application scenarios

IoT: accelerate your IIoT projects with CrateDB, delivering real-time analytics...
» more

Key customers

Across all continents, CrateDB is used by companies of all sizes to meet the most...
» more

Market metrics

The CrateDB open source project was started in 2013 Honorable Mention in 2021 Gartner®...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

See CrateDB pricing >
» more

News

Edge AI: The era of on-device AI
23 April 2024

In-Memory Database Use Cases
15 February 2024

Data Viewer for Objects – announcing ObjectBox Admin
14 November 2023

Vector Databases for Edge AI
9 August 2023

Vector Database Release for Flutter / Dart + Python
13 June 2023

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and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.