DBMS > Couchbase vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Lovefield vs. MariaDB vs. SpatiaLite

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Lovefield vs. MariaDB vs. SpatiaLite

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

Embeddable relational database for web apps written in pure JavaScript

MySQL application compatible open source RDBMS, enhanced with high availability, security, interoperability and performance capabilities. MariaDB ColumnStore provides a column-oriented storage engine and MariaDB Xpand supports distributed SQL.

Spatial extension of SQLite

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

Document store
Graph DBMS

with OQGraph storage engine
Spatial DBMS

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	0.33
Rank	#286	Overall
	#131	Relational DBMS

Score	91.04
Rank	#13	Overall
	#9	Relational DBMS

Score	1.63
Rank	#146	Overall
	#3	Spatial DBMS

Website

www.couchbase.com

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

google.github.io/lovefield

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

www.gaia-gis.it/fossil/libspatialite/index

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

github.com/google/lovefield/blob/master/docs/spec_index.md

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

www.gaia-gis.it/gaia-sins/spatialite_topics.html

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Google

MariaDB Corporation Ab (MariaDB Enterprise),
MariaDB Foundation (community MariaDB Server)

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

Alessandro Furieri

Initial release

2011

2010

2014

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

2008

Current release

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

2.1.12, February 2017

11.3.2, February 2024

5.0.0, August 2020

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

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription available

Open Source

MPL 1.1, GPL v2.0 or LGPL v2.1

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.

STACKIT MariaDB offers MariaDB in a fully managed version in enterprise grade, 100% GDPR-compliant.

Implementation language

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Erlang

JavaScript

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

tested with Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

server-less

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

SQL-like query language

via JavaScript builder pattern

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

JavaScript

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

yes

PL/SQL compatibility added with version 10.3

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

Using read-only observers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

none

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

none

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

none

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, by using IndexedDB or the cloud service Firebase Realtime Database

yes

not for in-memory storage engine

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

Ephemeral buckets

yes

using MemoryDB

yes

with MEMORY storage engine

yes

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

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Competitive advantages

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Typical application scenarios

Web, SaaS and Cloud operational applications that require high availability, scalability...
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Key customers

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Market metrics

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Licensing and pricing models

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