ArangoDB vs Cassandra vs Couchbase

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ArangoDB

276
442
+ 1
192
Cassandra

3.6K
3.5K
+ 1
507
Couchbase

478
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+ 1
110

ArangoDB vs Cassandra vs Couchbase: What are the differences?

Introduction:

ArangoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase are all popular databases with their own unique features and use cases. Understanding the key differences between these databases can help in making an informed decision on which one to choose for a specific project or application.

  1. Data Model: ArangoDB is a multi-model database that supports key/value, document, and graph data models within the same database. Cassandra is a wide-column store NoSQL database that is specifically optimized for write-heavy workloads. Couchbase is a NoSQL database that primarily functions as a key-value store but also supports JSON document storage.

  2. Consistency and Partitions: ArangoDB provides Multi-Master replication with synchronous replication for strong consistency. Cassandra offers eventual consistency with tunable consistency levels and allows for easy distribution of data across multiple nodes. Couchbase supports eventual consistency as well but also offers strong consistency levels for transactions.

  3. Query Language: ArangoDB uses AQL (ArangoDB Query Language) which is SQL-like and allows for complex queries involving joins, nested queries, and transactions. Cassandra uses CQL (Cassandra Query Language) which is similar to SQL but has limitations due to its distributed nature. Couchbase supports N1QL (SQL for JSON) which is a SQL-like query language that simplifies querying JSON documents.

  4. Scalability: ArangoDB can scale both vertically and horizontally, making it suitable for a wide range of applications. Cassandra is highly scalable horizontally and can handle large amounts of data and traffic. Couchbase also offers horizontal scalability with built-in sharding and rebalancing mechanisms.

  5. Data Distribution: ArangoDB uses a master-slave architecture for data distribution and replication, allowing for fault tolerance and high availability. Cassandra uses a decentralized peer-to-peer architecture with no single point of failure and automatic data distribution. Couchbase utilizes a distributed architecture with built-in data replication for high availability and fault tolerance.

  6. Use Cases: ArangoDB is well-suited for applications requiring flexible data models and complex querying capabilities. Cassandra is widely used for real-time applications that require high availability and scalability. Couchbase is often chosen for caching, session storage, and other use cases that benefit from a distributed key-value store.

In Summary, understanding the key differences between ArangoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase can help in choosing the right database for specific project requirements.

Advice on ArangoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase
Ilias Mentzelos
Software Engineer at Plum Fintech · | 9 upvotes · 240.6K views
Needs advice
on
CouchbaseCouchbase
and
MongoDBMongoDB

Hey, we want to build a referral campaign mechanism that will probably contain millions of records within the next few years. We want fast read access based on IDs or some indexes, and isolation is crucial as some listeners will try to update the same document at the same time. What's your suggestion between Couchbase and MongoDB? Thanks!

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Replies (2)
Jon Clarke
Enterprise Account Exec at ScyllaDB · | 4 upvotes · 87.3K views
Recommends
on
CouchbaseCouchbaseScyllaDBScyllaDB

I am biased (work for Scylla) but it sounds like a KV/wide column would be better in this use case. Document/schema free/lite DBs data stores are easier to get up and running on but are not as scalable (generally) as NoSQL flavors that require a more rigid data model like ScyllaDB. If your data volumes are going to be 10s of TB and transactions per sec 10s of 1000s (or more), look at Scylla. We have something called lightweight transactions (LWT) that can get you consistency.

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Recommends
on
MongoDBMongoDB

I have found MongoDB highly consistent and highly available. It suits your needs. We usually trade off partion tolerance fot this. Having said that, I am little biased in recommendation as I haven't had much experience with couchbase on production.

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Umair Iftikhar
Technical Architect at ERP Studio · | 3 upvotes · 447.1K views
Needs advice
on
CassandraCassandraDruidDruid
and
TimescaleDBTimescaleDB

Developing a solution that collects Telemetry Data from different devices, nearly 1000 devices minimum and maximum 12000. Each device is sending 2 packets in 1 second. This is time-series data, and this data definition and different reports are saved on PostgreSQL. Like Building information, maintenance records, etc. I want to know about the best solution. This data is required for Math and ML to run different algorithms. Also, data is raw without definitions and information stored in PostgreSQL. Initially, I went with TimescaleDB due to PostgreSQL support, but to increase in sites, I started facing many issues with timescale DB in terms of flexibility of storing data.

My major requirement is also the replication of the database for reporting and different purposes. You may also suggest other options other than Druid and Cassandra. But an open source solution is appreciated.

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Replies (1)
Recommends
on
MongoDBMongoDB

Hi Umair, Did you try MongoDB. We are using MongoDB on a production environment and collecting data from devices like your scenario. We have a MongoDB cluster with three replicas. Data from devices are being written to the master node and real-time dashboard UI is using the secondary nodes for read operations. With this setup write operations are not affected by read operations too.

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Needs advice
on
CouchbaseCouchbase
and
MongoDBMongoDB

We Have thousands of .pdf docs generated from the same form but with lots of variability. We need to extract data from open text and more important - from tables inside the docs. The output of Couchbase/Mongo will be one row per document for backend processing. ADOBE renders the tables in an unusable form.

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Replies (3)
Petr Havlicek
Freelancer at havlicekpetr.cz · | 12 upvotes · 214.8K views
Recommends
on
MongoDBMongoDB

I prefer MongoDB due to own experience with migration of old archive of pdf and meta-data to a new “archive”. The biggest advantage is speed of filters output - a new archive is way faster and reliable then the old one - but also the the easy programming of MongoDB with many code snippets and examples available. I have no personal experience so far with Couchbase. From the architecture point of view both options are OK - go for the one you like.

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Ivan Begtin
Founder - Dateno, Director - NGO "Informational Culture" / Ambassador - OKFN Armenia at Infoculture · | 7 upvotes · 214.9K views
Recommends
on
ArangoDBArangoDB

I would like to suggest MongoDB or ArangoDB (can't choose both, so ArangoDB). MongoDB is more mature, but ArangoDB is more interesting if you will need to bring graph database ideas to solution. For example if some data or some documents are interlinked, then probably ArangoDB is a best solution.

To process tables we used Abbyy software stack. It's great on table extraction.

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OtkudznamDamir Radinović-Lukić
Recommends
on
LinuxLinux

If you can select text with mouse drag in PDF. Use pdftotext it is fast! You can install it on server with command "apt-get install poppler-utils". Use it like "pdftotext -layout /path-to-your-file". In same folder it will make text file with line by line content. There is few classes on git stacks that you can use, also.

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Vinay Mehta
Needs advice
on
CassandraCassandra
and
ScyllaDBScyllaDB

The problem I have is - we need to process & change(update/insert) 55M Data every 2 min and this updated data to be available for Rest API for Filtering / Selection. Response time for Rest API should be less than 1 sec.

The most important factors for me are processing and storing time of 2 min. There need to be 2 views of Data One is for Selection & 2. Changed data.

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Replies (4)
Recommends
on
ScyllaDBScyllaDB

Scylla can handle 1M/s events with a simple data model quite easily. The api to query is CQL, we have REST api but that's for control/monitoring

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Alex Peake
Recommends
on
CassandraCassandra

Cassandra is quite capable of the task, in a highly available way, given appropriate scaling of the system. Remember that updates are only inserts, and that efficient retrieval is only by key (which can be a complex key). Talking of keys, make sure that the keys are well distributed.

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Pankaj Soni
Chief Technical Officer at Software Joint · | 2 upvotes · 159.3K views
Recommends
on
CassandraCassandra

i love syclla for pet projects however it's license which is based on server model is an issue. thus i recommend cassandra

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Recommends
on
ScyllaDBScyllaDB

By 55M do you mean 55 million entity changes per 2 minutes? It is relatively high, means almost 460k per second. If I had to choose between Scylla or Cassandra, I would opt for Scylla as it is promising better performance for simple operations. However, maybe it would be worth to consider yet another alternative technology. Take into consideration required consistency, reliability and high availability and you may realize that there are more suitable once. Rest API should not be the main driver, because you can always develop the API yourself, if not supported by given technology.

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Decisions about ArangoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase
Gabriel Pa

After using couchbase for over 4 years, we migrated to MongoDB and that was the best decision ever! I'm very disappointed with Couchbase's technical performance. Even though we received enterprise support and were a listed Couchbase Partner, the experience was horrible. With every contact, the sales team was trying to get me on a $7k+ license for access to features all other open source NoSQL databases get for free.

Here's why you should not use Couchbase

Full-text search Queries The full-text search often returns a different number of results if you run the same query multiple types

N1QL queries Configuring the indexes correctly is next to impossible. It's poorly documented and nobody seems to know what to do, even the Couchbase support engineers have no clue what they are doing.

Community support I posted several problems on the forum and I never once received a useful answer

Enterprise support It's very expensive. $7k+. The team constantly tried to get me to buy even though the community edition wasn't working great

Autonomous Operator It's actually just a poorly configured Kubernetes role that no matter what I did, I couldn't get it to work. The support team was useless. Same lack of documentation. If you do get it to work, you need 6 servers at least to meet their minimum requirements.

Couchbase cloud Typical for Couchbase, the user experience is awful and I could never get it to work.

Minimum requirements The minimum requirements in production are 6 servers. On AWS the calculated monthly cost would be ~$600. We achieved better performance using a $16 MongoDB instance on the Mongo Atlas Cloud

writing queries is a nightmare While N1QL is similar to SQL and it's easier to write because of the familiarity, that isn't entirely true. The "smart index" that Couchbase advertises is not smart at all. Creating an index with 5 fields, and only using 4 of them won't result in Couchbase using the same index, so you have to create a new one.

Couchbase UI The UI that comes with every database deployment is full of bugs, barely functional and the developer experience is poor. When I asked Couchbase about it, they basically said they don't care because real developers use SQL directly from code

Consumes too much RAM Couchbase is shipped with a smaller Memcached instance to handle the in-memory cache. Memcached ends up using 8 GB of RAM for 5000 documents! I'm not kidding! We had less than 5000 docs on a Couchbase instance and less than 20 indexes and RAM consumption was always over 8 GB

Memory allocations are useless I asked the Couchbase team a question: If a bucket has 1 GB allocated, what happens when I have more than 1GB stored? Does it overflow? Does it cache somewhere? Do I get an error? I always received the same answer: If you buy the Couchbase enterprise then we can guide you.

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Gabriel Pa

We implemented our first large scale EPR application from naologic.com using CouchDB .

Very fast, replication works great, doesn't consume much RAM, queries are blazing fast but we found a problem: the queries were very hard to write, it took a long time to figure out the API, we had to go and write our own @nodejs library to make it work properly.

It lost most of its support. Since then, we migrated to Couchbase and the learning curve was steep but all worth it. Memcached indexing out of the box, full text search works great.

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Pros of ArangoDB
Pros of Cassandra
Pros of Couchbase
  • 37
    Grahps and documents in one DB
  • 26
    Intuitive and rich query language
  • 25
    Good documentation
  • 25
    Open source
  • 21
    Joins for collections
  • 15
    Foxx is great platform
  • 14
    Great out of the box web interface with API playground
  • 6
    Good driver support
  • 6
    Low maintenance efforts
  • 6
    Clustering
  • 5
    Easy microservice creation with foxx
  • 4
    You can write true backendless apps
  • 2
    Managed solution available
  • 0
    Performance
  • 119
    Distributed
  • 98
    High performance
  • 81
    High availability
  • 74
    Easy scalability
  • 53
    Replication
  • 26
    Reliable
  • 26
    Multi datacenter deployments
  • 10
    Schema optional
  • 9
    OLTP
  • 8
    Open source
  • 2
    Workload separation (via MDC)
  • 1
    Fast
  • 18
    High performance
  • 18
    Flexible data model, easy scalability, extremely fast
  • 9
    Mobile app support
  • 7
    You can query it with Ansi-92 SQL
  • 6
    All nodes can be read/write
  • 5
    Equal nodes in cluster, allowing fast, flexible changes
  • 5
    Both a key-value store and document (JSON) db
  • 5
    Open source, community and enterprise editions
  • 4
    Automatic configuration of sharding
  • 4
    Local cache capability
  • 3
    Easy setup
  • 3
    Linearly scalable, useful to large number of tps
  • 3
    Easy cluster administration
  • 3
    Cross data center replication
  • 3
    SDKs in popular programming languages
  • 3
    Elasticsearch connector
  • 3
    Web based management, query and monitoring panel
  • 2
    Map reduce views
  • 2
    DBaaS available
  • 2
    NoSQL
  • 1
    Buckets, Scopes, Collections & Documents
  • 1
    FTS + SQL together

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Cons of ArangoDB
Cons of Cassandra
Cons of Couchbase
  • 3
    Web ui has still room for improvement
  • 2
    No support for blueprints standard, using custom AQL
  • 3
    Reliability of replication
  • 1
    Size
  • 1
    Updates
  • 3
    Terrible query language

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What is ArangoDB?

A distributed free and open-source database with a flexible data model for documents, graphs, and key-values. Build high performance applications using a convenient SQL-like query language or JavaScript extensions.

What is Cassandra?

Partitioning means that Cassandra can distribute your data across multiple machines in an application-transparent matter. Cassandra will automatically repartition as machines are added and removed from the cluster. Row store means that like relational databases, Cassandra organizes data by rows and columns. The Cassandra Query Language (CQL) is a close relative of SQL.

What is Couchbase?

Developed as an alternative to traditionally inflexible SQL databases, the Couchbase NoSQL database is built on an open source foundation and architected to help developers solve real-world problems and meet high scalability demands.

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What are some alternatives to ArangoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase?
Neo4j
Neo4j stores data in nodes connected by directed, typed relationships with properties on both, also known as a Property Graph. It is a high performance graph store with all the features expected of a mature and robust database, like a friendly query language and ACID transactions.
MongoDB
MongoDB stores data in JSON-like documents that can vary in structure, offering a dynamic, flexible schema. MongoDB was also designed for high availability and scalability, with built-in replication and auto-sharding.
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system that supports an extended subset of the SQL standard, including transactions, foreign keys, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types and functions.
OrientDB
It is an open source NoSQL database management system written in Java. It is a Multi-model database, supporting graph, document, key/value, and object models, but the relationships are managed as in graph databases with direct connections between records.
MySQL
The MySQL software delivers a very fast, multi-threaded, multi-user, and robust SQL (Structured Query Language) database server. MySQL Server is intended for mission-critical, heavy-load production systems as well as for embedding into mass-deployed software.
See all alternatives