DBMS > Couchbase vs. Fauna vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. InterSystems IRIS vs. Stardog

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. Fauna vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. InterSystems IRIS vs. Stardog

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.

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.

A containerised multi-model DBMS, interoperability and analytics data platform with wide capabilities for vertical and horizontal scalability

Enterprise Knowledge Graph platform and graph DBMS with high availability, high performance reasoning, and virtualization

Primary database model

Document store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Relational DBMS
Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

Document store
Key-value store
Object oriented DBMS
Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS
RDF store

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

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

Score	16.59
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	1.55
Rank	#151	Overall
	#26	Document stores
	#14	Graph DBMS
	#71	Relational DBMS
	#13	Time Series DBMS

Score	2.84
Rank	#100	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Score	3.54
Rank	#84	Overall
	#14	Document stores
	#10	Key-value stores
	#1	Object oriented DBMS
	#45	Relational DBMS

Score	2.07
Rank	#122	Overall
	#11	Graph DBMS
	#6	RDF stores

Website

www.couchbase.com

fauna.com

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.intersystems.com/products/intersystems-iris

www.stardog.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

docs.fauna.com

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

docs.intersystems.com/irislatest/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls

docs.stardog.com

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Fauna, Inc.

Google

InterSystems

Stardog-Union

Initial release

2011

2014

2017

2018

2010

Current release

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

2023.3, June 2023

7.3.0, May 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

commercial

60-day fully-featured trial license; 1-year fully-featured non-commercial use license for academics/students

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

Java

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

AIX
Linux
macOS
Ubuntu
Windows

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

depending on used data model

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support

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

Import/export of XML data possible

Secondary indexes

yes

supports real-time indexing in full-text and geospatial

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

Yes, compatible with all major SQL variants through dedicated BI/SQL Server

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
JDBC

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

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

GraphQL query language
HTTP API
Jena RDF API
OWL
RDF4J API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SNARL
SPARQL
Spring Data
Stardog Studio
TinkerPop 3

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C#
Go
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby
Scala
Swift

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net
Clojure
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

user defined functions

yes

user defined functions and aggregates, HTTP Server extensions in Java

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

via event handlers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

horizontal partitioning

consistent hashing

Sharding

none

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 with 3 replicas for regional instances.

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication in HA-Cluster

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 in HA-Cluster

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

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

yes

relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

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

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

Access rights for users and roles

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

InterSystems IRIS is a complete cloud-first data platform which includes a multi-model...
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