DBMS > Couchbase vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. LMDB vs. Riak KV

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. LMDB vs. Riak KV

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

Cloud Firestore is an auto-scaling document database for storing, syncing, and querying data for mobile and web apps. It offers seamless integration with other Firebase and Google Cloud Platform products.

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 high performant, light-weight, embedded key-value database library

Distributed, fault tolerant key-value store

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

with links between data sets and object tags for the creation of secondary indexes

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	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	7.85
Rank	#51	Overall
	#8	Document stores

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	1.99
Rank	#125	Overall
	#21	Key-value stores

Score	4.10
Rank	#82	Overall
	#9	Key-value stores

Website

www.couchbase.com

firebase.google.com/products/firestore

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.symas.com/symas-embedded-database-lmdb

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

firebase.google.com/docs/firestore

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

www.lmdb.tech/doc

www.tiot.jp/riak-docs/riak/kv/latest

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Google

Symas

OpenSource, formerly Basho Technologies

Initial release

2011

2017

2011

2009

Current release

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

0.9.32, January 2024

3.2.0, December 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2, commercial enterprise edition

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

Erlang

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
Unix
Windows

Linux
OS X

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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

restricted

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

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

Android
gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
iOS
JavaScript API
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

HTTP API
Native Erlang Interface

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Go
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
Python

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net
C
C++
Clojure
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Nim
Objective C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Rust
Swift
Tcl

unofficial client library
C#
C++

unofficial client library
Clojure

unofficial client library
Dart

unofficial client library
Erlang
Go

unofficial client library
Groovy

unofficial client library
Haskell

unofficial client library
Java
JavaScript

unofficial client library
Lisp

unofficial client library
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

unofficial client library
Smalltalk

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

yes, Firebase Rules & Cloud Functions

Erlang

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes, with Cloud Functions

yes

pre-commit hooks and post-commit hooks

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

none

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

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.

none

selectable replication factor

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Using Cloud Dataflow

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

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

links between data sets can be stored

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

yes

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.

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management. Security Rules for 3rd party authentication using Firebase Auth.

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

yes, using Riak Security

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