DBMS > Couchbase vs. IBM Cloudant vs. PostgreSQL vs. TerminusDB vs. Virtuoso

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. IBM Cloudant vs. PostgreSQL vs. TerminusDB vs. Virtuoso

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

Widely used open source RDBMS

Developed as objectoriented DBMS (Postgres), gradually enhanced with 'standards' like SQL

Scalable Graph Database platform making enterprise data available by exploiting inferred entities and relationships

Virtuoso is a multi-model hybrid-RDBMS that supports management of data represented as relational tables and/or property graphs

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

with object oriented extensions, e.g.: user defined types/functions and inheritance. Handling of key/value pairs with hstore module.

Graph DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Native XML DBMS
Relational DBMS
RDF store
Search engine

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 Apache Age
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

with pgvector extension

Document store
RDF store

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	16.74
Rank	#33	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	2.85
Rank	#95	Overall
	#18	Document stores

Score	644.36
Rank	#4	Overall
	#4	Relational DBMS

Score	0.19
Rank	#311	Overall
	#27	Graph DBMS

Score	3.99
Rank	#75	Overall
	#13	Document stores
	#4	Graph DBMS
	#2	Native XML DBMS
	#40	Relational DBMS
	#2	RDF stores
	#9	Search engines

Website

www.couchbase.com

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

www.postgresql.org

terminusdb.com

virtuoso.openlinksw.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

www.postgresql.org/docs

terminusdb.github.io/terminusdb/#

docs.openlinksw.com/virtuoso

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

PostgreSQL Global Development Group

www.postgresql.org/developer

DataChemist Ltd.

OpenLink Software

Initial release

2011

2010

1989

1989: Postgres, 1996: PostgreSQL

2018

1998

Current release

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

16.4, August 2024

11.0.0, January 2023

7.2.11, September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

commercial

Open Source

BSD

Open Source

GPL V3

Open Source

GPLv2, extended commercial license available

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.

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Implementation language

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Erlang

Prolog, Rust

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
NetBSD
OpenBSD
OS X
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

SQL - Standard relational schema
RDF - Quad (S, P, O, G) or Triple (S, P, O)
XML - DTD, XML Schema
DAV - freeform filesystem objects, plus User Defined Types a/k/a Dynamic Extension Type

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

specific XML-type available, but no XML query functionality.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

standard with numerous extensions

SQL-like query language (WOQL)

yes

SQL-92, SQL-200x, SQL-3, SQLX

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
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

OWL
RESTful HTTP API
WOQL (Web Object Query Language)

ADO.NET
GeoSPARQL
HTTP API
JDBC
Jena RDF API
ODBC
OLE DB
RDF4J API
RESTful HTTP API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SOAP webservices
SPARQL 1.1
WebDAV
XPath
XQuery
XSLT

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++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

JavaScript
Python

.Net
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Visual Basic

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

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

yes

Virtuoso PL

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

partitioning by range, list and (since PostgreSQL 11) by hash

Graph Partitioning

yes

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

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

Journaling Streams

Chain, star, and bi-directional replication
Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

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

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 journaling

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

Ephemeral buckets

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

Role-based access control

Fine-grained Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) in addition to typical coarse-grained Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) according to SQL-standard. Pluggable authentication with supported standards (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos)

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Virtuoso is a modern multi-model RDBMS for managing data represented as tabular relations...
» more

Competitive advantages

Performance & Scale — as exemplified by DBpedia and the LOD Cloud it spawned, i.e.,...
» more

Typical application scenarios

Used for — Analytics/BI Conceptual Data Virtualization Enterprise Knowledge Graphs...
» more

Key customers

Broad use across enterprises and governments including — European Union (EU) US Government...
» more

Market metrics

Largest installed-base of Multi-Model RDBMS for AI-friendly Knowledge Graphs Platform...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Available in both Commercial Enterprise and Open Source (GPL v2) Editions Feature...
» more

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.

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