DBMS > Couchbase vs. Dragonfly vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Redis vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. Dragonfly vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Redis vs. Sphinx

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

A drop-in Redis replacement that scales vertically to support millions of operations per second and terabyte sized workloads, all on a single instance

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Popular in-memory data platform used as a cache, message broker, and database that can be deployed on-premises, across clouds, and hybrid environments

Redis focuses on performance so most of its design decisions prioritize high performance and very low latencies.

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

Primary database model

Multiple data types and a rich set of operations, as well as configurable data expiration, eviction and persistence

Search engine

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
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Document store

with RedisJSON
Graph DBMS

with RedisGraph
Spatial DBMS
Search engine

with RediSearch
Time Series DBMS

with RedisTimeSeries
Vector DBMS

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

Score	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	0.41
Rank	#266	Overall
	#38	Key-value stores

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	157.80
Rank	#6	Overall
	#1	Key-value stores

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

www.couchbase.com

github.com/dragonflydb/dragonfly
www.dragonflydb.io

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

redis.com
redis.io

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

www.dragonflydb.io/docs

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

docs.redis.com/latest/index.html
redis.io/docs

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

DragonflyDB team and community contributors

Microsoft

Redis project core team, inspired by Salvatore Sanfilippo

Development sponsored by Redis Inc.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2011

2023

1989

2009

2001

Current release

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

1.0, March 2023

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

7.2.4, January 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

Open Source

BSL 1.1

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

source-available extensions (modules), commercial licenses for Redis Enterprise

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence 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.

SQLServer Flex @ STACKIT offers a managed version of SQL Server with adjustable CPU, RAM, storage amount and speed, in enterprise grade to perfectly match all application requirements. All services are 100% GDPR-compliant.

Aiven for Redis: Fully managed in-memory key-value store for all your caching and speedy lookup needs.

Implementation language

C, C++, Go and Erlang

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

Linux
Windows

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

ported and maintained by Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

scheme-free

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets, bit arrays

yes

partial

Supported data types are strings, hashes, lists, sets and sorted sets, bit arrays, hyperloglogs and geospatial indexes

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

with RediSearch module

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

with RediSQL module

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

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

Proprietary protocol

RESP - REdis Serialization Protocol

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

proprietary protocol

RESP - REdis Serialization Protocol

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C
C#
C++
Clojure
D
Dart
Elixir
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lisp
Lua
Objective-C
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Rust
Scala
Swift
Tcl

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

C
C#
C++
Clojure
Crystal
D
Dart
Elixir
Erlang
Fancy
Go
Haskell
Haxe
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Pascal
Perl
PHP
Prolog
Pure Data
Python
R
Rebol
Ruby
Rust
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Swift
Tcl
Visual Basic

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

Lua

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

Lua; Redis Functions coming in Redis 7 (slides and Github)

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

publish/subscribe channels provide some trigger functionality

yes

publish/subscribe channels provide some trigger functionality; RedisGears

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

Sharding

Automatic hash-based sharding with support for hash-tags for manual sharding

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

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Multi-source replication

with Redis Enterprise Pack
Source-replica replication

Chained replication is supported

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

through RedisGears

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Causal consistency can be enabled in Active-Active databases
Strong consistency with Redis Raft
Strong eventual consistency with Active-Active

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Atomic execution of command blocks and scripts

ACID

Atomic execution of command blocks and scripts and optimistic locking

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, strict serializability by the server

yes

Data access is serialized by the server

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Configurable mechanisms for persistency via snapshots and/or operations logs

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

Ephemeral buckets

yes

User concepts

Access control

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

Password-based authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access Control Lists (ACLs): redis.io/docs/management/security/acl
LDAP and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) for Redis Enterprise
Mutual TLS authentication: redis.io/docs/management/security/encryption
Password-based authentication

More information provided by the system vendor

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.