DBMS > Couchbase vs. Heroic vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Kingbase vs. QuestDB

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. Heroic vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Kingbase vs. QuestDB

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

Time Series DBMS built at Spotify based on Cassandra or Google Cloud Bigtable, and ElasticSearch

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

An enterprise-class RDBMS compatible with PostgreSQL and Oracle and widely used in China.

A high performance open source SQL database for time series data

Primary database model

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
Spatial 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	0.51
Rank	#255	Overall
	#21	Time Series DBMS

Score	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	0.45
Rank	#262	Overall
	#123	Relational DBMS

Score	2.52
Rank	#109	Overall
	#9	Time Series DBMS

Website

www.couchbase.com

github.com/spotify/heroic

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

www.kingbase.com.cn

questdb.io

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

spotify.github.io/heroic

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

questdb.io/docs

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Spotify

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

BeiJing KINGBASE Information technologies inc.

QuestDB Technology Inc

Initial release

2011

2014

2010

1999

2014

Current release

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

V8.0, August 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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

Erlang

C and Java

Java (Zero-GC), C++, Rust

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
Windows

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free via InfluxDB Line Protocol

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

via Elasticsearch

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

Standard with numerous extensions

SQL with time-series extensions

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

HQL (Heroic Query Language, a JSON-based language)
HTTP API

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
gokb
JDBC
kdbndp
ODBC
PDI
PDO
Pro*C
psycopg2
QT

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

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

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

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

over HTTP

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

horizontal partitioning (by range, list and hash) and vertical partitioning

horizontal partitioning (by timestamps)

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Source-replica replication with eventual consistency

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

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

ACID for single-table writes

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

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

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 can be defined per database

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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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