DBMS > Couchbase vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. SAP HANA vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. SAP HANA vs. Snowflake

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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

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

In-memory, column based data store. Available as appliance or cloud service

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Primary database model

Document store

Relational 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
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

with SAP Hana, Enterprise Edition
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	44.69
Rank	#22	Overall
	#16	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

www.couchbase.com

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

www.sap.com/products/hana.html

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

help.sap.com/hana

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Microsoft

SAP

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2011

1989

2010

2014

Current release

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

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

2.0 SPS07 (April 4, 2023), April 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

commercial

restricted free version is available

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

also available as a cloud based 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

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
Windows

Appliance or cloud-service

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

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

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

JDBC
ODBC

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

SQLScript, R

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

yes

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

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

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

User concepts

Access control

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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