DBMS > Couchbase vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Kinetica vs. TiDB vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Kinetica vs. TiDB 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

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Fully vectorized database across both GPUs and CPUs

TiDB is an open source distributed SQL database that supports Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) workloads. It is MySQL compatible and features horizontal scalability, strong consistency, and high availability.

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

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

Time Series 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

Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

Document store

Relational DBMS

DB-Engines Ranking measures the popularity of database management systems
Trend Chart

Score	16.59
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	2.75
Rank	#104	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Score	0.66
Rank	#234	Overall
	#107	Relational DBMS

Score	4.25
Rank	#74	Overall
	#40	Relational DBMS

Score	4.46
Rank	#71	Overall
	#5	Time Series DBMS

Website

www.couchbase.com

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

www.kinetica.com

pingcap.com

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

docs.kinetica.com

docs.pingcap.com/tidb/stable

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Kinetica

PingCAP, Inc.

Timescale

Initial release

2011

2010

2012

2016

2017

Current release

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

7.1, August 2021

8.1.0, May 2024

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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.

TiDB Cloud: Fully-managed TiDB Service. Bring everything great about TiDB to the cloud.

Implementation language

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Erlang

C, C++

Go, Rust

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

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

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

GORM
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
SQLAlchemy

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

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

.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++

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

user defined functions

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

triggers when inserted values for one or more columns fall within a specified range

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

horizontal partitioning (by key range)

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

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication

Using Raft consensus algorithm to ensure data replication with strong consistency among multiple replicas.

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

with TiSpark Connector

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

full support since version 6.6

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

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

GPU vRAM or System RAM

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

Access rights for users and roles on table level

Fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

TiDB is an advanced open-source, distributed SQL database for modern application...
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Competitive advantages

- HORIZONTAL SCALING : TiDB grants total transparency into your data workloads without...
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Typical application scenarios

TiDB is ideal for transactional applications that require extreme scalability and...
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Key customers

Block, Pinterest, Catalyst, Bolt, Flipkart, Capcom, Shopee (E-commerce), JD Cloud...
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Market metrics

34K+ GitHub stars 5K+ members in TiDB Community Slack 1K+ community contributors...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

TiDB Community : Free open source software (Apache 2.0) TiDB Self-Hosted : Enterprise...
» more

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and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.