DBMS > Couchbase vs. Datomic vs. Elasticsearch vs. Google Cloud Bigtable vs. NSDb

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. Datomic vs. Elasticsearch vs. Google Cloud Bigtable vs. NSDb

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

Datomic builds on immutable values, supports point-in-time queries and uses 3rd party systems for durability

A distributed, RESTful modern search and analytics engine based on Apache Lucene

Elasticsearch lets you perform and combine many types of searches such as structured, unstructured, geo, and metric

Google's NoSQL Big Data database service. It's the same database that powers many core Google services, including Search, Analytics, Maps, and Gmail.

Scalable, High-performance Time Series DBMS designed for Real-time Analytics on top of Kubernetes

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Key-value store
Wide column store

Time Series 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

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

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

Score	16.59
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	1.66
Rank	#144	Overall
	#66	Relational DBMS

Score	132.83
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	3.15
Rank	#95	Overall
	#14	Key-value stores
	#8	Wide column stores

Score	0.08
Rank	#369	Overall
	#40	Time Series DBMS

Website

www.couchbase.com

www.datomic.com

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

cloud.google.com/bigtable

nsdb.io

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

docs.datomic.com

www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/index.html

cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs

nsdb.io/Architecture

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Cognitect

Elastic

Google

Initial release

2011

2012

2010

2015

2017

Current release

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

1.0.7075, December 2023

8.6, January 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

commercial

limited edition free

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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

Implementation language

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Java, Clojure

Java

Java, Scala

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Linux
macOS

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

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

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes: int, bigint, decimal, string

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

All search fields are automatically indexed

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

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

SQL-like query language

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

RESTful HTTP API

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
HappyBase (Python library)
HBase compatible API (Java)

gRPC
HTTP REST
WebSocket

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Clojure
Java

.Net
Groovy
Community Contributed Clients
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Java
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

yes

Transaction Functions

yes

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

By using transaction functions

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

none

But extensive use of caching in the application peers

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

none

But extensive use of caching in the application peers

yes

Internal replication in Colossus, and regional replication between two clusters in different zones

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

ES-Hadoop Connector

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

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

Immediate consistency (for a single cluster), Eventual consistency (for two or more replicated clusters)

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Atomic single-row operations

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

using external storage systems (e.g. Cassandra, DynamoDB, PostgreSQL, Couchbase and others)

yes

Using Apache Lucene

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

Ephemeral buckets

yes

recommended only for testing and development

Memcached and Redis integration

User concepts

Access control

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

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

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