DBMS > Couchbase vs. Google Cloud Datastore vs. QuestDB vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. Google Cloud Datastore vs. QuestDB vs. Sphinx

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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

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

A high performance open source SQL database for time series data

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Primary database model

Document store

Time Series 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

Relational DBMS

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

Score	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	4.47
Rank	#76	Overall
	#12	Document stores

Score	2.52
Rank	#109	Overall
	#9	Time Series DBMS

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

www.couchbase.com

cloud.google.com/datastore

questdb.io

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

cloud.google.com/datastore/docs

questdb.io/docs

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Google

QuestDB Technology Inc

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2011

2008

2014

2001

Current release

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

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

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 (Zero-GC), C++, Rust

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
macOS
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free via InfluxDB Line Protocol

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

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

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

SQL-like query language (GQL)

SQL with time-series extensions

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

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

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

HTTP REST
InfluxDB Line Protocol (TCP/UDP)
JDBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

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

PostgreSQL driver
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Rust

over HTTP

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

using Google App Engine

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

Callbacks using the Google Apps Engine

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

horizontal partitioning (by timestamps)

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication using Paxos

Source-replica replication with eventual consistency

none

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 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

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Serializable Isolation within Transactions, Read Committed outside of Transactions

ACID for single-table writes

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

Ephemeral buckets

yes

through memory mapped files

User concepts

Access control

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

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Relational model with native time series support Column-based storage and time partitioned...
» more

Competitive advantages

High ingestion throughput: peak of 4M rows/sec (TSBS Benchmark) Code optimizations...
» more

Typical application scenarios

Financial tick data Industrial IoT Application Metrics Monitoring
» more

Key customers

Banks & Hedge funds, Yahoo, OKX, Airbus, Aquis Exchange, Net App, Cloudera, Airtel,...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Open source Apache 2.0 QuestDB Enterprise QuestDB Cloud
» more

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