DBMS > Couchbase vs. Realm vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. Realm vs. Sphinx

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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

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

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Primary database model

Document 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

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

Score	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	7.60
Rank	#52	Overall
	#9	Document stores

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

www.couchbase.com

realm.io

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

realm.io/docs

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2011

2014

2001

Current release

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

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

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

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

Android
Backend: server-less
iOS
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

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

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

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

Proprietary protocol

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

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

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

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

Change Listeners

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

none

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center 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

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

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

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

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

User concepts

Access control

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

yes

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