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What are the best databases to use for Node.js applications?

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The Best 1 of 9 OptionsWhy?

9 Options ConsideredPriceLast Updated
The Best
PostgreSQL
Mar 25, 2018
RethinkDB
Jan 30, 2018
CouchDB
Aug 16, 2017
MongoDB
Apr 23, 2018
SQLite
Mar 13, 2018
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The Best

PostgreSQL

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Endi Sukaj
Top Pro

High performance

•••
PostgreSQL performance increases with each release, this is also proven by many benchmark tests. Notable performance features include: As PostgreSQL only supports one storage engine, it has been able to integrate and optimise it and with the rest of the database. This has resulted in multiple...
Andris Pelcbergs
Tony Tamplin
Top Pro

Fully ACID compliant

•••
PostgreSQL is known to have a very holistic approach to robustness and data integrity which is reflected by it being fully ACID compliant. PostgreSQL has always been strict about making sure data is valid before allowing it into the database, and there is no way for a client to bypass those check...
Endi Sukaj
Top Pro

Strong community

•••
PostgreSQL has a strong community backing it, with guides, tutorials and support for any kind of problem a developer may have.
Endi Sukaj
Top Pro

Support for JSON data type

•••
JSON data can be stored as a column with optional indexes. In 9.4 (upcoming at the time of this writing), JSONB will be a binary version of JSON that will save space. It's like the best of the NO-SQL world without having to give up ACID and Relationships. This means that cascading deletes can...
Endi Sukaj
Tony Tamplin
Top Pro

Multiple node packages available

•••
There are many packages (like Sequelize) that integrate deeply with the features Postgres offers.
Tony Tamplin
Top Pro

Actively developed

•••
Regular fixes and features are released
Endi Sukaj
Luis Forte
Top Pro

Support for geographic objects

•••
PostgreSQL can be extended to have geographic object support through PostGIS and allows for location queries to be run through SQL.
Endi Sukaj
Val K
Top Pro

Support Perl and Python for coding stored procedures

•••
Postgres supports popular languages for coding stored procedures, such as Perl and Python. So, you can fairly easy transform just DB-server to reliable Service with complex business logic.
Endi Sukaj
Top Con

Not suited for small apps

•••
Because of it's complexity and power, it may be an overkill to use PostgreSQL in small applications that will not make use of it's full power.
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8 Other Options Considered

RethinkDB

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Bryan
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.
Michael Zehrer
Izem Lavrenti
RonBurgundy
Top Pro

Horizontal scalability

•••
RethinkDB is scalable horizontally. It has support for sharding, parallel queries and MVCC concurrency.
Bryan
Top Pro

Changefeeds (change listeners)

•••
You can listen to changes and trigger code based on these changes.
Andris Pelcbergs
Michael Zehrer
Top Pro

Powerful query language

•••
RethinkDB's ReQL is a very powerful functional query language. The functional aspects of ReQL and the straightforward implementation of the Node driver for Rethinkdb make it a natural fit for Javascript developers. You no longer have to type some obscure syntax in quotes (aka SQL), your queri...
Endi Sukaj
gabeio
Top Pro

Ease of cluster setup

•••
You can directly tell it to shard/replicate and how many shards/replicas depending on the amount of nodes. Each node doesn't need anything except one other node's ip/port in the cluster to join and maybe the auth.
Bryan
Izem Lavrenti
RonBurgundy
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.
Endi Sukaj
Top Pro

Auto master promotion

•••
Unlike a lot of other databases where if the master is down the system is down, this one if the master is down someone else is made master so much more peer to peer.
David Nunez
Top Con

Cannot run queries from its CLI

•••
Bryan
Top Con

No user accounts

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

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Sean Lang
Top Pro

Simple Map/Reduce support

•••
The M/R system lets you process terabytes of documents in parallel, save the results, and only need to reprocess documents that have changed on subsequent updates. While not as powerful as Hadoop, it is an easy to use query system that's hard to screw up.
Sean Lang
Top Pro

Replicate and sync with the browser via PouchDB

•••
You can keep a synced copy of your database on the client-side with PouchDB. This allows for much faster data access than HTTP would allow, and offline usage.
Endi Sukaj
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.
Sean Lang
Top Pro

Sharding and Clustering support

•••
As of CouchDB 2.0, it supports clustering and sharding of documents between instances without needing a load balancer to determine where requests should go.
Sean Lang
Top Pro

Master-Master replication

•••
You can clone, continuously backup, and listen for changes through the replication protocol, even over unreliable WAN links.
Endi Sukaj
Top Pro

Works well between physical network partitions

•••
CouchDB works very well even when the network is physically partitioned
Endi Sukaj
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
Endi Sukaj
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 da...
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MongoDB

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Endi Sukaj
Andris Pelcbergs
Thomas Koefod
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...
Izem Lavrenti
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.
Chloe Montanez
CaringCipactonal
Top Pro

Perfect documentation and tutorials

•••
Miles above other databases in educational resources.
Izem Lavrenti
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 ma...
Chloe Montanez
Endi Sukaj
Ilya Petrov
Top Con

Reported to lose or corrupt data

•••
MongoDB is famously known for leaking and losing data over time.
Ilya Petrov
thermoplastics
Top Con

Document Stores may be not suited for relational data

•••
MongoDB has no JOIN, all relations are supposed to be resolved client-size which entails additional requests to the server.
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SQLite

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Alex
FerventShulmanu
Top Pro

Flexible

•••
Serverless, limitless and easy to implement and use.
CaffeinatedAscalaphus
Top Con

Limited locking

•••
Locking is done at file/database level -- effectively only one process or thread can update at a time. This puts a severe limit on the scalabilty of this database for server applications.

Orchestrate

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Matthew Heitzenroder
Top Pro

Effortless/Automatic Scaling

•••
Orchestrate was built for scale. Orchestrate is a full-fledged distributed data system, provided as a multi-tenant service. There is no need to manage finite server resources like disk space, CPU, or memory
Endi Sukaj
Matthew Heitzenroder
Top Pro

Already set up for you

•••
Orchestrate is a Database-as-a-Service, so there is no downloading, installation, or any other administration. It also makes configuration management and deployment easy.
Matthew Heitzenroder
Top Pro

Great Node.js support

•••
Orchestrate.js is a first class client for Node.js applications
Matthew Heitzenroder
Top Pro

Fault Tolerance Baked In

•••
As a DBaaS, Orchestrate manages replicas and sharding across multiple machines. Additionally, daily backups are managed by the company.
Matthew Heitzenroder
Top Pro

Multiple Query types at Low Latencies

•••
No other database provides Full-Text-Search, Time-Series, Graph, and Key/Value APIs. Moreover, as a DBaaS, the queries are pre-optimized for low latencies. Consistently under 10ms for any query.
Wernight
Top Con

Data are not on your server

•••
Since it's a DBaaS, your data are completely on their server. It cannot be run on your server. Backup is handled by them as well, which may be good or not depending on your needs.
Endi Sukaj
Ilya Petrov
Top Con

Not Open Source

•••
Orchestrate is not an open source solution.
See 5 more Pros & ConsSee 5 more Pros & Cons

Couchbase

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Izem Lavrenti
Top Pro

Ability to make predefined fast queries

•••
With Couchbase you can make "Views" of data, which are practically predefined queries which are fetched with an O(1) algorithm.
Izem Lavrenti
Top Pro

Open source

•••
Couchbase and Couchbase Mobile are open source and released under the Apache License.
Izem Lavrenti
Top Con

No way to manage data through a CLI

•••
Data hosted on Couchbase can only be managed through the Couchbase GUI. There's no way to do it through the terminal.
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ArangoDB

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Reid Lai
Top Pro

Easy cluster setup

•••
Ingo Friepoertner
Endi Sukaj
Stephan Hoyer
Top Pro

Supports joins

•••
Unlike many NoSQL databases, ArangoDB does support joins in AQL queries.
Ingo Friepoertner
Endi Sukaj
Stephan Hoyer
Top Pro

Transaction save

•••
You can use ACID Transactions for short and small data retrieval and/or modification operations in ArangoDB.
Endi Sukaj
Ingo Friepoertner
Stephan Hoyer
Top Pro

JavaScript-API

•••
You can extend ArangoDB using JavaScript that runs directly on the Server (Google V8). You can build data-centric microservices that aggregate, validate, transform or enrich data (It's up to you, plain JavaScript) and provide those via a custom API route.
Ingo Friepoertner
Aubrey
Endi Sukaj
Top Pro

Document and graph-orientend

•••
You can model your data as documents or as a graph - no data model lock-in. You can even combine both models and use them in a single AQL query.
Laura Kyle
Bitmind
Top Pro

Powerful Java Driver (Sync & Async)

•••
ArangoDB has a very good Java Driver for synchronous and asynchronous. In addition the team there is working on a Spring Data integration.
Know any negative aspects of this option?
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MySQL

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Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Lots of community support available

•••
As MySQL is used by a lot of people, there's a good number of libraries, tutorials and examples available that should help you through all kinds of situations.
Izem Lavrenti
Top Pro

Multiple third-party tools that help working with MySQL

•••
Since MySQL is one of the most popular relational databases, maybe the most popular, there exist many third-party tools and applications that help developers to use MySQL in their development.
Izem Lavrenti
Top Pro

Scalable

•••
MySQL is made to handle a lot of data and to be used in large applications. This makes it extremely scalable and fast, even under a lot of workload.
Izem Lavrenti
Top Pro

Easy to start working with

•••
Because of it's popularity there are a lot of tutorials and guides out there that help developers install and work with MySQL. The installation process itself is not very hard and there are multiple powerful GUI tools that make it extremely easy to work with MySQL for a beginner.
Izem Lavrenti
Top Con

Error messages usually are not very detailed

•••
When you are trying to do something in MySQL and something goes wrong it will simply give you an error message with an error code. WHich does not say much about what went wrong unless you look it up online. This can be a little cumbersome during development.
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159 Community Recommendations

Travis Rigg
Steven Vachon
Eugene A. Simonenko
gabeio
Harry Hummel
Fabián Heredia Montiel
APF
Pavel Eduard
Flávio de Sousa
Francis Brunelle
Eduardo Blumenfeld
+120
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InterestingClotho
InterestingClotho
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RethinkDB
5 months ago
too complicated to install and badly explained
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