DBMS > Couchbase vs. Elasticsearch vs. IBM Cloudant vs. MariaDB vs. VelocityDB

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. Elasticsearch vs. IBM Cloudant vs. MariaDB vs. VelocityDB

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 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

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

MySQL application compatible open source RDBMS, enhanced with high availability, security, interoperability and performance capabilities. MariaDB ColumnStore provides a column-oriented storage engine and MariaDB Xpand supports distributed SQL.

A .NET Object Database that can be embedded/distributed and extended to a graph data model (VelocityGraph)

Primary database model

Graph DBMS
Object oriented 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

Document store
Graph DBMS

with OQGraph storage engine
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	16.59
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	132.83
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	2.75
Rank	#104	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Score	91.04
Rank	#13	Overall
	#9	Relational DBMS

Score	0.11
Rank	#354	Overall
	#37	Graph DBMS
	#15	Object oriented DBMS

Website

www.couchbase.com

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

velocitydb.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

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

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

velocitydb.com/UserGuide

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Elastic

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

MariaDB Corporation Ab (MariaDB Enterprise),
MariaDB Foundation (community MariaDB Server)

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

VelocityDB Inc

Initial release

2011

2010

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

2011

Current release

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

8.6, January 2023

11.3.2, February 2024

7.x

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription available

commercial

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.

STACKIT MariaDB offers MariaDB in a fully managed version in enterprise grade, 100% GDPR-compliant.

Implementation language

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Java

Erlang

C and C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

Any that supports .NET

Data scheme

schema-free

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

schema-free

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

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

Secondary indexes

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

SQL-like query language

yes

with proprietary 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

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

.Net

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

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

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Eiffel
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

.Net

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

yes

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

yes

PL/SQL compatibility added with version 10.3

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

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

Eventual Consistency

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

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

not for in-memory storage engine

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

Ephemeral buckets

Memcached and Redis integration

yes

with MEMORY storage engine

yes

User concepts

Access control

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

Access rights for users can be defined per database

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Based on Windows Authentication

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

MariaDB is the most powerful open source relational database – modern SQL and JSON...
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Competitive advantages

MariaDB Servers have many features unavailable in other open source relational databases....
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Typical application scenarios

Web, SaaS and Cloud operational applications that require high availability, scalability...
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Key customers

Deutsche Bank, DBS Bank, Nasdaq, Red Hat, ServiceNow, Verizon and Walgreens Featured...
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Market metrics

MariaDB is the default database in the LAMP stack supplied by Red Hat and SUSE Linux,...
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Licensing and pricing models

MariaDB plc subscriptions cover our free, open source database, Community Server,...
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