Apache CouchDB is an HTTP + JSON document database with Map Reduce views and bi-directional replication. The Couch Replication Protocol is implemented in a variety of projects and products that span computing environments from globally distributed server-clusters, over mobile phones to web browsers.
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Elasticsearch
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Elasticsearch is an enterprise search tool from Elastic in Mountain View, California.
$16
per month
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Apache CouchDB
Elasticsearch
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$16.00
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$22.00
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CouchDB
Elasticsearch
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Apache CouchDB
Elasticsearch
Features
Apache CouchDB
Elasticsearch
NoSQL Databases
Comparison of NoSQL Databases features of Product A and Product B
It's good as a general JSON document store and basic map/reduce system. For more specialized tasks like message queuing, graph traversal, streaming metrics aggregation, or arbitrary table joins, I'd recommend another database.
Elasticsearch is really well suited for searching text (Natural Language Processing) and you can fine tune the searches and scoring very well. I like the ability to find Significant Terms in the Index, where you can find aggregations that are really relevant to a specific search. It also allows for queries to lead to new queries via aggregations which is great for navigating your data. It is less suited to doing more complex aggregations where slices of data are required to be processing using guassian normalizations. And doing searches which join different documents is very very hard, and requires serious thought on how to denormalize data.
Setting Java memory thresholds can be a pain for those not accustomed to things like Eden Space & Old Generation which can lead to over allocation, or more likely, under allocation. Apache Solr had a similar issue. It would be nice if the program would take an extra step and dogfood it's own advice by analyzing the system & processes to return a solid recommendation for that configuration. The proper configuration information is outlined in the documentation, it would be nice if that was automated.
The only health check that ElasticSearch reports back is a "red" status without any real solid information about what is going on, though its usually memory thresholds or disk I/O. I am currently on ElasticSearch 1.5 so that may have changed for newer versions. When the status goes "red", I as the administrator of the software, feel like I lose control of whats going on which should rarely happen. Something more verbose would eliminate that.
This is more of a critique of the ElasticStack in general. The whole top to bottom stack is starting to get feature creep with things that are better suited in other software and increasing the barrier for entry for people to get started with setting up a robust logging infrastructure. ElasticSearch as a storage search engine, is pretty streamlined, but I can see that the tools that comprise the ELK Stack are going to require a certification with constant study at some point. During major release for Logstash a while back, it literally took a month to learn a new language because Elastic completely changed the syntax. For a medium sized organization of only a couple of admins, that is a pretty high bar where time is money. They really should work on refining/automating the tools & search engine they have, instead of shoehorning/changing things on to an already rock solid foundation.
As a highly distributed database system, CouchDB naturally has strong high availability with traffic load-balancing capability. It is also easy to scale and replicate data in a cluster for redundancy. However, there is still some room for query performance improvement in the future.
Couchdb is very simple to use and the features are also reduced but well implemented. In order to use it the way its designed, the ui is adequate and easy. Of course, there are some other task that can't be performed through the admin ui but the minimalistic design allows you to use external libraries to develop custom scripts
To get started with Elasticsearch, you don't have to get very involved in configuring what really is an incredibly complex system under the hood. You simply install the package, run the service, and you're immediately able to begin using it. You don't need to learn any sort of query language to add data to Elasticsearch or perform some basic searching. If you're used to any sort of RESTful API, getting started with Elasticsearch is a breeze. If you've never interacted with a RESTful API directly, the journey may be a little more bumpy. Overall, though, it's incredibly simple to use for what it's doing under the covers.
We've only used it as an opensource tooling. We did not purchase any additional support to roll out the elasticsearch software. When rolling out the application on our platform we've used the documentation which was available online. During our test phases we did not experience any bugs or issues so we did not rely on support at all.
it support is minimal also hw requirements. Also for development, we can have databases replicated everywhere and the replication is automagical. once you set up the security and the rules for replication, you are ready to go. The absence of a model let you build your app the way you want it
Open Source, and freely able to install it on any OS you desire (the big 3, anyways) CouchDB was selected for that, it's early-adoption of JSON and its mobile-friendly environment. Also, I have used it off and on in various non-professional projects, and it was really one of the first exposure to databases in my career
Elasticsearch is the most well-known and supported free data platform that we identified. We are taking advantage of community knowledge and practices. In terms of flexibility and breadth of use cases no other competitor came close to Elasticsearch. We've tried Solr in the past be we encountered issues which were deal-breaking for us. MongoDB - it just did not pass our evaluation parameters as a main data platform. We still use it for smaller purposes, though.
Biggest impact on our business has been that CouchDB has been pretty invisible from a cost or issues perspective. It just works.
We use the Apache releases, so it's free. Of course there is a cost to "free" - we have invested time to become fluent in using and understanding CouchDB. But we feel the investment was well worth the effort and we have a solid, fundamental technology to our products that "just works".
There are some things we do - SaaS vs self-hosting - that have probably been kept simple by using CouchDB. Overall, we are extremely happy with CouchDB.
I am not in finance and I suspect even if I was this would be hard to measure. But for sure, Elasticsearch has enabled us to have the most flexible data model in the industry for our customer's data, and in doing so we have attracted many many technical customers and got much of their $$$.
One problem with Elasticsearch is that because it runs on the JVM, there can be some stop-the-world JVM garbage collections happening that can take down nodes and reduce indexing speed. The solution for that tends to be "let's just upgrade the CPU on that machine". And before you know it you are paying $$$ because this'll happen with 40+ machines.
On the other hand, I do think that ES is more efficient than other systems and so it requires fewer nodes to keep it highly tolerant and available, so we probably saved some money that way.
