DBMS > Couchbase vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. LMDB vs. Memcached vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. LMDB vs. Memcached vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

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

In-memory key-value store, originally intended for caching

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Primary database model

Document store

Key-value store

Relational DBMS

column oriented

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

Document store

If a column is of type dynamic docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/scalar-data-types/dynamic then it's possible to add arbitrary JSON documents in this cell
Event Store

this is the general usage pattern at Microsoft. Billing, Logs, Telemetry events are stored in ADX and the state of an individual entity is defined by the arg_max(timestamps)
Spatial DBMS
Search engine

support for complex search expressions docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/parseoperator FTS, Geospatial docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/geo-point-to-geohash-function distributed search -> ADX acts as a distributed search engine
Time Series DBMS

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer/time-series-analysis

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	1.99
Rank	#125	Overall
	#21	Key-value stores

Score	19.42
Rank	#32	Overall
	#4	Key-value stores

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Website

www.couchbase.com

firebase.google.com/products/firestore

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

www.memcached.org

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

firebase.google.com/docs/firestore

www.lmdb.tech/doc

github.com/memcached/memcached/wiki

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Google

Symas

Danga Interactive

originally developed by Brad Fitzpatrick for LiveJournal

Microsoft

Initial release

2011

2017

2011

2003

2019

Current release

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

0.9.32, January 2024

1.6.25, March 2024

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

commercial

Open Source

BSD license

commercial

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

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
Unix
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

bool, datetime, dynamic, guid, int, long, real, string, timespan, double: docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/scalar-data-types

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

Secondary indexes

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

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

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

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

Proprietary protocol

Microsoft SQL Server communication protocol (MS-TDS)
RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

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

.Net
C
C++
ColdFusion
Erlang
Java
Lisp
Lua
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PowerShell
Python
R

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

yes, Firebase Rules & Cloud Functions

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes, with Cloud Functions

yes

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/management/updatepolicy

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication

none

Repcached, a Memcached patch, provides this functionallity

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service. Replication either local, cross-facility or geo-redundant.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Using Cloud Dataflow

Spark connector (open source): github.com/Azure/azure-kusto-spark

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

yes

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.

yes

using SASL (Simple Authentication and Security Layer) protocol

Azure Active Directory Authentication

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