DBMS > Couchbase vs. Heroic vs. Realm vs. RRDtool vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. Heroic vs. Realm vs. RRDtool vs. TimescaleDB

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

A DBMS built for use on mobile devices that’s a fast, easy to use alternative to SQLite and Core Data

Industry standard data logging and graphing tool for time series data. RRD is an acronym for round-robin database.

The data is stored in a circular buffer, thus the system storage footprint remains constant over time.

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

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

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	7.60
Rank	#52	Overall
	#9	Document stores

Score	1.87
Rank	#136	Overall
	#11	Time Series DBMS

Score	4.64
Rank	#71	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Website

www.couchbase.com

github.com/spotify/heroic

realm.io

oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

spotify.github.io/heroic

realm.io/docs

oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/doc

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Spotify

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

Tobias Oetiker

Timescale

Initial release

2011

2014

1999

2017

Current release

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

1.8.0, 2022

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

GPL V2 and FLOSS

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

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

Implementations in Java (e.g. RRD4J) and C# available

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

Android
Backend: server-less
iOS
Windows

HP-UX
Linux

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Numeric data only

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex 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.

Exporting into and restoring from XML files possible

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

via Elasticsearch

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

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

in-process shared library
Pipes

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
Java

with Android only
Objective-C
React Native
Swift

with librrd library
C#

with a different implementation of RRDTool
Java

with a different implementation of RRDTool
JavaScript (Node.js)

with a different implementation of RRDTool
Lua
Perl
PHP

with a wrapper library
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

runs within the applications so server-side scripts are unnecessary

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

Change Listeners

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

none

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

yes

none

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

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

Immediate Consistency

none

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

by using the rrdcached daemon

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

In-Memory realm

yes

User concepts

Access control

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

yes

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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