DBMS > Couchbase vs. Firebird vs. GraphDB vs. IBM Cloudant vs. SwayDB

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. Firebird vs. GraphDB vs. IBM Cloudant vs. SwayDB

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

Firebird is an open source RDBMS forked from Borland's InterBase

Enterprise-ready RDF and graph database with efficient reasoning, cluster and external index synchronization support. It supports also SQL JDBC access to Knowledge Graph and GraphQL over SPARQL.

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

An embeddable, non-blocking, type-safe key-value store for single or multiple disks and in-memory storage

Primary database model

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	20.50
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	3.25
Rank	#91	Overall
	#7	Graph DBMS
	#4	RDF stores

Score	2.75
Rank	#104	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Score	0.04
Rank	#387	Overall
	#61	Key-value stores

Website

www.couchbase.com

www.firebirdsql.org

www.ontotext.com

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

swaydb.simer.au

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

graphdb.ontotext.com/documentation

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

Social network pages

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Firebird Foundation

Ontotext

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Simer Plaha

Initial release

2011

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2000

2010

2018

Current release

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

5.0.0, January 2024

10.4, October 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Some plugins of GraphDB Workbench are open sourced

commercial

Open Source

GNU Affero GPL V3.0

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

C and C++

Java

Erlang

Scala

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

All OS with a Java VM
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support; RDF shapes

schema-free

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

yes, supports real-time synchronization and indexing in SOLR/Elastic search/Lucene and GeoSPARQL geometry data indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

stored SPARQL accessed as SQL using Apache Calcite through JDBC/ODBC

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

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

GeoSPARQL
GraphQL
GraphQL Federation
Java API
JDBC
RDF4J API
RDFS
RIO
Sail API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL 1.1

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C#
Clojure
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

Java
Kotlin
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

PSQL

well-defined plugin interfaces; JavaScript server-side extensibility

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

none

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Immediate Consistency, Eventual consistency (configurable in cluster mode per master or individual client request)

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Constraint checking

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

atomic operations within a document possible

Atomic execution of operations

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Features a multi-generational MVCC architecture, readers do not block writers

yes

Optimistic locking

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.

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

Default Basic authentication through RDF4J client, or via Java when run with cURL, default token-based in the Workbench or via Rest API, optional access through OpenID or Kerberos single sign-on.

Access rights for users can be defined per database

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Ontotext GraphDB is a semantic database engine that allows organizations to build...
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Competitive advantages

GraphDB allows you to link text and data in big knowledge graphs. It’s easy to experiment...
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Typical application scenarios

Metadata enrichment and management, linked data publishing, semantic inferencing...
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Key customers

GraphDB provides a platform for building next-generation AI and Knowledge Graph...
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Market metrics

GraphDB is the most utilized semantic triplestore for mission-critical enterprise...
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Licensing and pricing models

GraphDB Free is a non-commercial version and is free to use. GraphDB Enterprise edition...
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and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.