DBMS > HBase vs. IBM Cloudant vs. PouchDB vs. Sphinx vs. SQLite

System Properties Comparison HBase vs. IBM Cloudant vs. PouchDB vs. Sphinx vs. SQLite

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on Apache Hadoop and on concepts of BigTable

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

JavaScript DBMS with an API inspired by CouchDB

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

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

Primary database model

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

Score	30.50
Rank	#26	Overall
	#2	Wide column stores

Score	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	2.28
Rank	#115	Overall
	#21	Document stores

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	114.32
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Website

hbase.apache.org

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

pouchdb.com

sphinxsearch.com

www.sqlite.org

Technical documentation

hbase.apache.org/book.html

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

pouchdb.com/guides

sphinxsearch.com/docs

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Powerset

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Apache Software Foundation

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Initial release

2008

2010

2012

2001

2000

Current release

2.3.4, January 2021

7.1.1, June 2019

3.5.1, February 2023

3.45.3 (15 April 2024), April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

Public Domain

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.

Implementation language

Java

Erlang

JavaScript

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
Unix
Windows

using Cygwin

hosted

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

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

server-less

Data scheme

schema-free, schema definition possible

schema-free

yes

dynamic column types

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

options to bring your own types, AVRO

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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

via views

yes

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP API
Thrift

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

HTTP REST

only for PouchDB Server
JavaScript API

Proprietary protocol

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Groovy
Java
PHP
Python
Scala

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

JavaScript

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Coprocessors in Java

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

View functions in JavaScript

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

with a proxy-based framework, named couchdb-lounge

Sharding

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

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication

also with CouchDB databases
Source-replica replication

also with CouchDB databases

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

Single row ACID (across millions of columns)

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

yes

via file-system locks

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using IndexedDB, WebSQL or LevelDB as backend

yes

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

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access Control Lists (ACL) for RBAC, integration with Apache Ranger for RBAC & ABAC

Access rights for users can be defined per database

More information provided by the system vendor

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.