Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
Couchbase vs InfluxDB: What are the differences?
Introduction
In this article, we will discuss the key differences between Couchbase and InfluxDB, two popular database management systems. Markdown code will be used to format the content for a website.
Scalability: Couchbase is designed to provide horizontal scalability by distributing data across a cluster of nodes. It uses a peer-to-peer architecture that allows for automatic data replication and high availability. On the other hand, InfluxDB is optimized for time-series data and can handle large-scale data ingestion and storage. It uses a sharding mechanism to distribute data across multiple servers, enabling it to handle high write and query loads efficiently.
Data Model: Couchbase is a document-oriented database that stores data in JSON-like documents. It provides flexibility in data storage, allowing documents to have varying structures, fields, and schema-less attributes. In contrast, InfluxDB is specifically designed for time-series data and uses a key-value pair data model. It organizes data into measurements, tags, and fields, making it more suitable for time-based data analysis and visualization.
Query Language: Couchbase uses N1QL (pronounced Nickel), a SQL-like query language that allows you to define, manipulate, and retrieve data from JSON documents. It supports a wide range of SQL-like syntax and joins with advanced data manipulation capabilities. On the other hand, InfluxDB uses InfluxQL, a simplified SQL-like query language that is optimized for querying time-series data. It includes specific functions and operators for time-based filtering and aggregation.
Indexing and Search: Couchbase provides full-text search capabilities using its integrated search engine called "Couchbase Full Text Search." It allows efficient indexing and querying of textual data in JSON documents. InfluxDB, on the other hand, does not provide built-in full-text search functionality but focuses on efficient indexing and querying of time-series data using its B-tree plus time-series index.
Consistency Model: Couchbase offers both strong and eventual consistency models. Strong consistency ensures that all clients see the same data at the same time, while eventual consistency allows for asynchronous replication and the possibility of temporary inconsistencies across different replicas. InfluxDB, on the other hand, provides eventual consistency, allowing for high availability and fault tolerance at the cost of potential temporary inconsistencies during replication.
Data Retention Policies: InfluxDB supports the concept of data retention policies, allowing you to define how long to retain data in the database. By specifying the retention policy, you can automatically expire and delete older data, which is useful for managing storage capacity. Couchbase does not have a built-in data retention policy mechanism, but you can implement similar functionality using data expiration and TTL (time-to-live) settings on individual documents.
In Summary, Couchbase and InfluxDB differ in their scalability, data model, query language, indexing and search capabilities, consistency models, and data retention policies.
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!
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.
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.
I have a lot of data that's currently sitting in a MariaDB database, a lot of tables that weigh 200gb with indexes. Most of the large tables have a date column which is always filtered, but there are usually 4-6 additional columns that are filtered and used for statistics. I'm trying to figure out the best tool for storing and analyzing large amounts of data. Preferably self-hosted or a cheap solution. The current problem I'm running into is speed. Even with pretty good indexes, if I'm trying to load a large dataset, it's pretty slow.
Druid Could be an amazing solution for your use case, My understanding, and the assumption is you are looking to export your data from MariaDB for Analytical workload. It can be used for time series database as well as a data warehouse and can be scaled horizontally once your data increases. It's pretty easy to set up on any environment (Cloud, Kubernetes, or Self-hosted nix system). Some important features which make it a perfect solution for your use case. 1. It can do streaming ingestion (Kafka, Kinesis) as well as batch ingestion (Files from Local & Cloud Storage or Databases like MySQL, Postgres). In your case MariaDB (which has the same drivers to MySQL) 2. Columnar Database, So you can query just the fields which are required, and that runs your query faster automatically. 3. Druid intelligently partitions data based on time and time-based queries are significantly faster than traditional databases. 4. Scale up or down by just adding or removing servers, and Druid automatically rebalances. Fault-tolerant architecture routes around server failures 5. Gives ana amazing centralized UI to manage data sources, query, tasks.
We are building an IOT service with heavy write throughput and fewer reads (we need downsampling records). We prefer to have good reliability when comes to data and prefer to have data retention based on policies.
So, we are looking for what is the best underlying DB for ingesting a lot of data and do queries easily
We had a similar challenge. We started with DynamoDB, Timescale, and even InfluxDB and Mongo - to eventually settle with PostgreSQL. Assuming the inbound data pipeline in queued (for example, Kinesis/Kafka -> S3 -> and some Lambda functions), PostgreSQL gave us a We had a similar challenge. We started with DynamoDB, Timescale and even InfluxDB and Mongo - to eventually settle with PostgreSQL. Assuming the inbound data pipeline in queued (for example, Kinesis/Kafka -> S3 -> and some Lambda functions), PostgreSQL gave us better performance by far.
Druid is amazing for this use case and is a cloud-native solution that can be deployed on any cloud infrastructure or on Kubernetes. - Easy to scale horizontally - Column Oriented Database - SQL to query data - Streaming and Batch Ingestion - Native search indexes It has feature to work as TimeSeriesDB, Datawarehouse, and has Time-optimized partitioning.
if you want to find a serverless solution with capability of a lot of storage and SQL kind of capability then google bigquery is the best solution for that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I chose TimescaleDB because to be the backend system of our production monitoring system. We needed to be able to keep track of multiple high cardinality dimensions.
The drawbacks of this decision are our monitoring system is a bit more ad hoc than it used to (New Relic Insights)
We are combining this with Grafana for display and Telegraf for data collection
Pros of Couchbase
- High performance18
- Flexible data model, easy scalability, extremely fast18
- Mobile app support9
- You can query it with Ansi-92 SQL7
- All nodes can be read/write6
- Equal nodes in cluster, allowing fast, flexible changes5
- Both a key-value store and document (JSON) db5
- Open source, community and enterprise editions5
- Automatic configuration of sharding4
- Local cache capability4
- Easy setup3
- Linearly scalable, useful to large number of tps3
- Easy cluster administration3
- Cross data center replication3
- SDKs in popular programming languages3
- Elasticsearch connector3
- Web based management, query and monitoring panel3
- Map reduce views2
- DBaaS available2
- NoSQL2
- Buckets, Scopes, Collections & Documents1
- FTS + SQL together1
Pros of InfluxDB
- Time-series data analysis59
- Easy setup, no dependencies30
- Fast, scalable & open source24
- Open source21
- Real-time analytics20
- Continuous Query support6
- Easy Query Language5
- HTTP API4
- Out-of-the-box, automatic Retention Policy4
- Offers Enterprise version1
- Free Open Source version1
Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions
Cons of Couchbase
- Terrible query language3
Cons of InfluxDB
- Instability4
- Proprietary query language1
- HA or Clustering is only in paid version1
Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions
What is Couchbase?
What is InfluxDB?
Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
What companies use Couchbase?
Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions
What tools integrate with Couchbase?
Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions
Blog Posts
+27