DBMS > IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Oracle NoSQL vs. Sphinx vs. TimesTen

System Properties Comparison IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Oracle NoSQL vs. Sphinx vs. TimesTen

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

A multi-model, scalable, distributed NoSQL database, designed to provide highly reliable, flexible, and available data management across a configurable set of storage nodes

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

In-Memory RDBMS compatible to Oracle

Primary database model

Document store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Document store
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.75
Rank	#104	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Score	27.71
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	3.05
Rank	#97	Overall
	#17	Document stores
	#16	Key-value stores
	#50	Relational DBMS

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	1.36
Rank	#161	Overall
	#75	Relational DBMS

Website

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

www.oracle.com/database/nosql/technologies/nosql

sphinxsearch.com

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/timesten.html

Technical documentation

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

docs.oracle.com/en/database/other-databases/nosql-database/index.html

sphinxsearch.com/docs

docs.oracle.com/database/timesten-18.1

Developer

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Microsoft

Oracle

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Oracle, TimesTen Performance Software, HP

originally founded in HP Labs it was acquired by Oracle in 2005

Initial release

2010

2014

2011

2001

1998

Current release

24.1, May 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

11 Release 2 (11.2.2.8.0)

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Proprietary for Enterprise Edition (Oracle Database EE license has Oracle NoSQL database EE covered: details)

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

commercial

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

Erlang

Java

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
Solaris SPARC/x86

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris SPARC/x86
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

Support Fixed schema and Schema-less deployment with the ability to interoperate between them.

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

optional

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

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

RESTful HTTP API

Proprietary protocol

JDBC
ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

Supported programming languages

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

C
C#
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

C
C++
Java
PL/SQL

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

JavaScript

PL/SQL

Triggers

yes

JavaScript

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

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

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Electable source-replica replication per shard. Support distributed global deployment with Multi-region table feature

none

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

with Hadoop integration

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

depending on configuration

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

atomic operations within a document possible

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

configurable

ACID within a storage node (=shard)

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

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

yes

by means of logfiles and checkpoints

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

off heap cache

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per database

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

Access rights for users and roles

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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