DBMS > Couchbase vs. GigaSpaces vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Access vs. Realm

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. GigaSpaces vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Access vs. Realm

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

High performance in-memory data grid platform, powering three products: Smart Cache, Smart ODS (Operational Data Store), Smart Augmented Transactions

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Microsoft Access combines a backend RDBMS (JET / ACE Engine) with a GUI frontend for data manipulation and queries.

The Access frontend is often used for accessing other datasources (DBMS, Excel, etc.)

A DBMS built for use on mobile devices that’s a fast, easy to use alternative to SQLite and Core Data

Primary database model

Document store

Document store
Object oriented DBMS

Values are user defined objects

Document store

Relational DBMS

Document 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

Graph DBMS
Search engine

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

Score	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	0.97
Rank	#192	Overall
	#32	Document stores
	#6	Object oriented DBMS

Score	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	7.60
Rank	#52	Overall
	#9	Document stores

Website

www.couchbase.com

www.gigaspaces.com

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/access

realm.io

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

docs.gigaspaces.com/latest/landing.html

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

realm.io/docs

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Gigaspaces Technologies

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Microsoft

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

Initial release

2011

2000

2010

1992

2014

Current release

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

15.5, September 2020

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

Open Source

Apache Version 2; Commercial licenses available

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

Open Source

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

Java, C++, .Net

Erlang

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

Android
Backend: server-less
iOS
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.

XML can be used for describing objects metadata

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

SQL-99 for query and DML statements

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

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

GigaSpaces LRMI
Hibernate
JCache
JDBC
JPA
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
C++
Java
Python
Scala

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java (JDBC-ODBC)
VBA
Visual Basic.NET

.Net
Java

with Android only
Objective-C
React Native
Swift

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

yes

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

runs within the applications so server-side scripts are unnecessary

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes, event driven architecture

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

Change Listeners

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

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

synchronous or asynchronous
Source-replica replication

synchronous or asynchronous

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Map-Reduce pattern can be built with XAP task executors

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable: ALL, QUORUM, ANY

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

but no files for transaction logging

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

Ephemeral buckets

yes

In-Memory realm

User concepts

Access control

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

Role-based access control

Access rights for users can be defined per database

a simple user-level security was built in till version Access 2003

yes

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