DBMS > Couchbase vs. Fauna vs. Google Cloud Datastore vs. Lovefield vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. Fauna vs. Google Cloud Datastore vs. Lovefield vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search

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

Fauna provides a web-native interface, with support for GraphQL and custom business logic that integrates seamlessly with the rest of the serverless ecosystem. The underlying globally distributed storage and compute platform is fast, consistent, and reliable, with a modern security infrastructure.

Automatically scaling NoSQL Database as a Service (DBaaS) on the Google Cloud Platform

Embeddable relational database for web apps written in pure JavaScript

Search-as-a-service for web and mobile app development

Primary database model

Document store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Relational DBMS
Time Series DBMS

Document store

Relational DBMS

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

Vector DBMS

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

Score	18.46
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	1.55
Rank	#154	Overall
	#26	Document stores
	#14	Graph DBMS
	#72	Relational DBMS
	#13	Time Series DBMS

Score	4.49
Rank	#79	Overall
	#12	Document stores

Score	0.32
Rank	#290	Overall
	#132	Relational DBMS

Score	5.71
Rank	#64	Overall
	#8	Search engines

Website

www.couchbase.com

fauna.com

cloud.google.com/datastore

google.github.io/lovefield

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/search

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

docs.fauna.com

cloud.google.com/datastore/docs

github.com/google/lovefield/blob/master/docs/spec_index.md

learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Fauna, Inc.

Google

Microsoft

Initial release

2011

2014

2008

2014

2015

Current release

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

2.1.12, February 2017

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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.

Implementation language

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Scala

JavaScript

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

tested with Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes, details here

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

SQL

Support of SQL

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

SQL-like query language (GQL)

SQL-like query language

via JavaScript builder pattern

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

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C#
Go
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby
Scala
Swift

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

JavaScript

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

user defined functions

using Google App Engine

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

Callbacks using the Google Apps Engine

Using read-only observers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

horizontal partitioning

consistent hashing

Sharding

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication

Multi-source replication using Paxos

none

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

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

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on type of query and configuration

Strong Consistency is default for entity lookups and queries within an Entity Group (but can instead be made eventually consistent). Other queries are always eventual consistent.

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

via ReferenceProperties or Ancestor paths

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Serializable Isolation within Transactions, Read Committed outside of Transactions

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, by using IndexedDB or the cloud service Firebase Realtime Database

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

Ephemeral buckets

yes

using MemoryDB

User concepts

Access control

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

Identity management, authentication, and access control

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

yes

using Azure authentication

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