DBMS > Couchbase vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Hive vs. NuoDB vs. SpaceTime

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Hive vs. NuoDB vs. SpaceTime

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

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.

data warehouse software for querying and managing large distributed datasets, built on Hadoop

NuoDB is a webscale distributed database that supports SQL and ACID transactions

SpaceTime is a spatio-temporal DBMS with a focus on performance.

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	61.17
Rank	#18	Overall
	#12	Relational DBMS

Score	0.89
Rank	#198	Overall
	#92	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#7	Spatial DBMS

Website

www.couchbase.com

cloud.google.com/spanner

hive.apache.org

www.3ds.com/nuodb-distributed-sql-database

www.mireo.com/spacetime

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/Hive/Home

doc.nuodb.com

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Google

Apache Software Foundation

initially developed by Facebook

Dassault Systèmes

originally NuoDB, Inc.

Mireo

Initial release

2011

2017

2012

2013

2020

Current release

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

3.1.3, April 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

limited edition free

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

Java

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Amazon EC2, Windows Azure, SoftLayer
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

A subset of ANSI SQL is implemented

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
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++
Java
PHP
Python

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

C#
C++
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

Java, SQL

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

data is dynamically stored/cached on the nodes where it is read/written

Fixed-grid hypercubes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

selectable replication factor

yes

Managed transparently by NuoDB

Real-time block device replication (DRBD)

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

yes

query execution via MapReduce

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

yes

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

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

tunable commit protocol

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

MVCC

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

Temporary table

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)

Access rights for users, groups and roles

Standard SQL roles/ privileges, Administrative Users

yes

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