What are the best non-relational databases for web apps?

11

Options
Considered

50

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Recs.

Jan 11, 2019

Last
Updated

Here’s the Deal

10 Options Considered

Best non-relational databases for web apps	Price	Last Updated
-- RethinkDB	-	Oct 15, 2016
-- Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple DB	-	Nov 11, 2018
71 MongoDB	-	Apr 12, 2018
-- CouchDB	-	Apr 12, 2018
-- OrientDB	-	Nov 30, 2016

RethinkDB

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Top Pro

Easy install

Only takes about 30 seconds to install. They also have a docker file for running it on AWS, Google Cloud or your own. See More

Top Con

No user accounts

This is just the database, you need to setup your own auth and user accounts (such as using Auth0). See More

Top Pro

Horizontal scalability

RethinkDB is scalable horizontally. It has support for sharing, parallel queries and MVCC concurrency. See More

Top Con

No Windows binaries

Windows binaries are yet to be released. They are on their way though. See More

Top Pro

CLI and web administration tools

RethinkDB has administration tools in both CLI and GUI (web app). You can view whats going on right away by going to localhost:8080. The data explorer allows you to run queries on the db. See More

Top Pro

Changefeeds (change listeners)

You can listen to changes and trigger code based on these changes. See More

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple DB

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Top Pro

Most mature service options

No other Cloud provide offers such a wide variety of Compute, Database and other options. See More

MongoDB

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Top Pro

Great speed

MongoDB queries can be very fast because the data is usually all in one place and can easily be retrieved in a single lookup. But this is true only when the data is truly a document. When it's trying to emulate a relational model it starts to become really slow because it may have to perform many independent queries to retrieve a single document. See More

Top Con

Reported to lose or corrupt data

MongoDB is famously known for leaking and losing data over time. See More

Top Pro

Doesn't require a unified data structure

Mongo is very flexible in that it doesn't require a unified data structure across all objects. So it's rather easy to use. See More

Top Con

No way to do many to many joins

While you can do this in your programming language, this is sub optimal and bad for large datasets. See More

Top Pro

Easy to scale

MongoDB has powerful sharding and scaling capabilities for when the data stored in the database gets so large that a single machine may not be able to store all of it. Sharding solves this problem through horizontal scaling. Mongo gives developers the ability to easily and painlessly add or remove as many machines as needed. See More

Top Pro

Thriving community & ecosystem of developers

Facebook, Percona, etc. mainstream developers are all working on improving it. See More

CouchDB

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Top Con

Uncertain future

After a very promising start, development began to drag after major supporters like Canonical, Selenium and CouchOne either shut down or moved to other tools. Development has begun to pick up again. See More

Top Pro

Ease of replication

It is easy to replicate a CouchDB instance to another, either as a snapshot or as a continuous replication process. In addition to hosting locally, you could replicate to one of the commercial CouchDB providers like Cloudant. See More

Top Con

Limited user control often requires one database for each user

Top Pro

Changes feed simplifies monitoring updates

It is easy for applications to subscribe to a _changes feed that provides notifications on database updates. See More

Top Con

Can only achieve consistency through replication and verification

Since CouchDB is considered an AP (Available, Partition-Tolerant database management system), it is not really consistent (not all clients can have the same view of the data consistently) and the only way to achieve some "eventual consistency" is through replication and verification of data. See More

Top Pro

Optional schema enforcement via Validation Functions

Although the data storage is schemaless, you can enforce a schema on your data by validating documents as they are inserted & modified. See More

Top Pro

Pure HTTP / REST API

You can access and manage the entire database over the web. No need for specialized drivers or language-specific libraries or writing a separate API for your application. See More

Top Pro

Flexible views

"Views" into a database can be written in JavaScript (or CoffeeScript). See More

Top Pro

Works well between physical network partitions

CouchDB works very well even when the network is physically partitioned See More

Top Pro

JSON

Data is stored as JSON "documents" making them trivial for web applications to consume. See More

Top Pro

Open Source

An Open Source project under the umbrella of the Apache Software Foundation. See More

Top Pro

Available

CouchDB is considered an available DMS according to the ACP theory of database management. As such it allows every client to always read and write. See More

Top Pro

Useful for applications where versioning is important

CouchDB is mostly used in applications where a large amount of data needs to be accumulated and where data only changes rarely. See More

Firebase

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Ensured longevity at least for the foreseeable future

Google acquired Firebase in Oct. 2014. This gives Firebase a degree of trustworthiness in their service and future support since they are backed by such a large company. See More

Top Con

Can't store sensitive data

Since Firebase is a hosted service, you cannot store sensitive data securely even if you encrypt them. See More

Top Pro

One command deploys and rollbacks

The content is deployed immediately through the Firebase CLI. Once it's uploaded, the content is served immediately. If you have made a mistake, you don't need to re-upload a new version, through the Admin dashboard you can easily rollback to a previous version. See More

Top Pro

Real-time notification API

Top Pro

Well documented

The documentation and quick start guides are informative and easy to learn. See More

RavenDB

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Google AppEngine DataStore

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Aerospike

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