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Add to SafariWhen comparing SQLite vs Couchbase, the Slant community recommends SQLite for most people. In the question“What are the best databases to use for Node.js applications?” SQLite is ranked 8th while Couchbase is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose SQLite is:
SQLite is also only 350KiB in size.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Small
SQLite is also only 350KiB in size.
Pro Great language support
SQLite has bindings for a large number of programming languages, including BASIC, Delphi, C, C#, C++, Clipper//Harbour, Common Lisp, Curl, D, Free Pascal, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Livecode, Lua, newLisp, Objective-C (on OS X and iOS), OCaml, Perl, PHP, Pike, PureBasic, Python, R, REALbasic, REBOL, Ruby, Scheme, Smalltalk, Tcl, Visual Basic.
Pro Self-contained
SQLite is largely self-contained. It requires very minimal support from external libraries or from the operating system.
Pro Portable
An SQLite database is a single ordinary disk file that can be located anywhere in the directory hierarchy. It works by sending requests to a single file where all the data is kept instead of communicating with a hosted database which gives access to an interface by making use of sockets and ports. The file format used is also cross-platform, so can easily be migrated to various machines.
This makes SQLite extremely portable throughout different applications, all that's needed to transfer the whole database is to make a copy of the file.
Pro Great for testing and first stages of development
Because of it's ability to scale and with the portability that a single-file database gives you without losing much of the power and features that SQL gives developers, it's a great choice for testing applications and for the early stages of development when the workload and the data that needs to be stored is not that large.
Pro Not unnecessarily fiddly
Pro Reliable
With less complication, there is less to go wrong.
Pro Zero configuration
There is literally no configuration required to get SQL lite up and running. This is mainly due to SQLite being serverless, there is no separate server process to install, setup, configure, initialize, manage, and troubleshoot.
Pro Open source
Couchbase and Couchbase Mobile are open source and released under the Apache License.
Pro Easy to implement N1QL queries
Pro Ability to run ad-hoc SQL like queries on realtime big data
Couchbase N1QL allows native SQL processing over JSON data with high performance indexing for low latency queries at scale.
Pro Easy sync protocol to mobile devices
The minimal code needed to pull data down to a device
Pro Available on Windows, Linux & macOS
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.
Cons
Con No multi user
Lacks multi-user capabilities, see SQLite vs. MySQL vs. PostgreSQL: A Comparison of Relational Databases.
Also see: Appropriate Uses For SQLite.
Con Some SQL features are missing
SQLite is made to be extremely lightweight and portable, but it still uses SQL. However, some SQL features such as RIGHT OUTER JOIN and FOR EACH STATEMENT are missing.
Con Vendor lock-in
Con No model mapper for Android
Couchbase does not have a model mapper for Android built-in and out of the box, instead you will have to write your own from scratch.
Con Not Compatible with couchdb
Since version 2 the sync-protocol is no longer compatible with couchdb. This makes couchbase nearly worthless
