DBMS > Couchbase vs. Drizzle vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. NuoDB vs. PostgreSQL

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. Drizzle vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. NuoDB vs. PostgreSQL

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Drizzle has published its last release in September 2012. The open-source project is discontinued and Drizzle is excluded from the DB-Engines ranking.

Description

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

MySQL fork with a pluggable micro-kernel and with an emphasis of performance over compatibility.

A horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service. It is the externalization of the core Google database that runs the biggest aspects of Google, like Ads and Google Play.

NuoDB is a webscale distributed database that supports SQL and ACID transactions

Widely used open source RDBMS

Developed as objectoriented DBMS (Postgres), gradually enhanced with 'standards' like SQL

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

with object oriented extensions, e.g.: user defined types/functions and inheritance. Handling of key/value pairs with hstore module.

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

with Apache Age
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

with pgvector extension

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

Score	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	0.89
Rank	#198	Overall
	#92	Relational DBMS

Score	645.54
Rank	#4	Overall
	#4	Relational DBMS

Website

www.couchbase.com

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.3ds.com/nuodb-distributed-sql-database

www.postgresql.org

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

doc.nuodb.com

www.postgresql.org/docs

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Drizzle project, originally started by Brian Aker

Google

Dassault Systèmes

originally NuoDB, Inc.

PostgreSQL Global Development Group

www.postgresql.org/developer

Initial release

2011

2008

2017

2013

1989

1989: Postgres, 1996: PostgreSQL

Current release

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

7.2.4, September 2012

16.3, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

Open Source

GNU GPL

commercial

limited edition free

Open Source

BSD

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

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Implementation language

C, C++, Go and Erlang

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X

hosted

Amazon EC2, Windows Azure, SoftLayer
Linux
OS X
Windows

FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
NetBSD
OpenBSD
OS X
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Data scheme

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.

yes

specific XML-type available, but no XML query functionality.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

standard with numerous extensions

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

JDBC

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

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

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C
C++
Java
PHP

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

Java, SQL

user defined functions

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

hooks for callbacks inside the server can be used.

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

data is dynamically stored/cached on the nodes where it is read/written

partitioning by range, list and (since PostgreSQL 11) by hash

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

yes

Managed transparently by NuoDB

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

tunable commit protocol

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

MVCC

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

Ephemeral buckets

yes

Temporary table

User concepts

Access control

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

Pluggable authentication mechanisms

e.g. LDAP, HTTP

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

Standard SQL roles/ privileges, Administrative Users

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

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