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Couchbase vs FoundationDB: What are the differences?

**Introduction**

1. **Architecture**: One key difference between Couchbase and FoundationDB is their architecture. Couchbase is a NoSQL database that employs a distributed architecture, with data distributed across multiple nodes in a cluster. In contrast, FoundationDB utilizes a distributed, multi-model database architecture that combines document storage, graph, and key-value store capabilities in a single platform.

2. **Consistency Model**: Another important difference is in their consistency models. Couchbase provides eventual consistency by default, where updates to data may propagate asynchronously across nodes in the cluster. On the other hand, FoundationDB offers strong consistency, ensuring that all reads reflect the most recent write, providing a more predictable and reliable data access model.

3. **Scaling**: When it comes to scaling, Couchbase supports horizontal scaling through partitioning data across nodes in a cluster, allowing for increased capacity and performance as nodes are added. While FoundationDB also supports horizontal scaling, it differs by enabling dynamic data distribution and rebalancing, making it easier to scale both storage and compute resources.

4. **Data Model**: The data model is another area where Couchbase and FoundationDB diverge. Couchbase is primarily a document-oriented database, storing data in JSON format and supporting various data structures like arrays and objects. FoundationDB, on the other hand, offers a key-value pair data model, with the flexibility to handle different types of data and relationships between keys.

5. **Transactions**: Transactional support is a significant difference between the two databases. Couchbase includes support for distributed transactions through its Multi-Dimensional Scaling architecture, allowing for ACID compliance across multiple nodes. FoundationDB, however, takes a different approach by providing multi-key ACID transactions, enabling complex operations on different keys within a single transaction.

6. **Community and Support**: Lastly, the level of community and support varies between Couchbase and FoundationDB. Couchbase has a larger user community and a well-established support system, offering resources like documentation, forums, and enterprise support services. In comparison, FoundationDB, now developed by Apple, benefits from strong corporate backing but may have a smaller user base and community support network.

In Summary, Couchbase and FoundationDB differ in their architecture, consistency models, scaling capabilities, data models, transaction support, and community and support offerings.
Advice on Couchbase and FoundationDB
Ilias Mentzelos
Software Engineer at Plum Fintech · | 9 upvotes · 245.3K 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 · 89.2K 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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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 · 219.8K 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 · 219.9K 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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Decisions about Couchbase and FoundationDB
Karan Kaushik
Senior Software Developer at Shyplite · | 5 upvotes · 39K views

So, we started using foundationDB for an OLAP system although the inbuilt tools for some core things like aggregation and filtering were negligible, with the high through put of the DB, we were able to handle it on the application. The system has been running pretty well for the past 6 months, although the data load isn’t very high yet, the performance is fairly promising

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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 Couchbase
Pros of FoundationDB
  • 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
  • 6
    ACID transactions
  • 5
    Linear scalability
  • 3
    Multi-model database
  • 3
    Key-Value Store
  • 3
    Great Foundation
  • 1
    SQL Layer

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Cons of Couchbase
Cons of FoundationDB
  • 3
    Terrible query language
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    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.

    What is FoundationDB?

    FoundationDB is a NoSQL database with a shared nothing architecture. Designed around a "core" ordered key-value database, additional features and data models are supplied in layers. The key-value database, as well as all layers, supports full, cross-key and cross-server ACID transactions.

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    What companies use Couchbase?
    What companies use FoundationDB?
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    What tools integrate with Couchbase?
    What tools integrate with FoundationDB?
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      What are some alternatives to Couchbase and FoundationDB?
      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.
      CouchDB
      Apache CouchDB is a database that uses JSON for documents, JavaScript for MapReduce indexes, and regular HTTP for its API. CouchDB is a database that completely embraces the web. Store your data with JSON documents. Access your documents and query your indexes with your web browser, via HTTP. Index, combine, and transform your documents with JavaScript.
      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.
      Redis
      Redis is an open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache, and message broker. Redis provides data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperloglogs, geospatial indexes, and streams.
      HBase
      Apache HBase is an open-source, distributed, versioned, column-oriented store modeled after Google' Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data by Chang et al. Just as Bigtable leverages the distributed data storage provided by the Google File System, HBase provides Bigtable-like capabilities on top of Apache Hadoop.
      See all alternatives