Couchbase Dominates Cassandra DataStax and MongoDB in Newly Released NoSQL Performance Benchmark

Mountain View, Calif. – September 11, 2014 – Couchbase, Inc., provider of the most complete NoSQL database, today announced final results of an independent NoSQL vendor comparison by Thumbtack Technology, Inc., an industry leader in NoSQL consulting services. The study found that when measured against typical workloads on some of the most common use cases, Couchbase consistently outperformed the competition in both performance and scalability, with remarkably higher throughput and lower latency on less hardware than other NoSQL solutions.

“More enterprises are choosing Couchbase Server for mission critical applications, not only because it significantly outperforms MongoDB and Cassandra, but also because it requires less hardware to do so,” said Ravi Mayuram, Senior Vice President of Products and Engineering, Couchbase.  “Our outstanding performance is a direct result of our masterless, auto-sharded shared nothing architecture. Combined with our memory and network centric data access philosophy, Couchbase Server is uniquely suited to perform at scale.”

Benchmark results

In the recent benchmark, Couchbase dominated in both performance and scalability, for read intensive and balanced workloads, demonstrating significantly higher throughput and lower latency over MongoDB and DataStax Enterprise.  Delivering unparalleled levels of speed during the read heavy workload, Couchbase peaked at 1.71 million ops/second in comparison to MongoDB at 227 thousand ops/second and DataStax Enterprise at 99 thousand ops/second.  While operating at this higher level of throughput, Couchbase also surpassed both vendors in read-write performance, demonstrating lower latency while using less hardware.

Additional results from the benchmark are below:

• Couchbase Server read-intensive throughput was 7x more than MongoDB
• Couchbase Server read-intensive throughput was 17x more than DataStax Enterprise
• Couchbase Server balanced read / write throughput was 14x more than MongoDB
• Couchbase Server balanced read / write throughput was 13x more than DataStax Enterprise

“Thumbtack works with organizations around the world to build and deploy scalable solutions.  We have implemented almost all the leading NoSQL vendors – including the three tested in this benchmark,” said Ben Engber, CEO of Thumbtack Technologies.  “Our intention with this benchmark is to provide a current set of metrics for database performance that is easy for others to verify and duplicate.  We believe this study does that quite well, and as a result, we are confident in our results that Couchbase Server 2.5 outperforms the competition on all measures.”

About the benchmark

The new benchmark, conducted by Thumbtack Technology, was done with the goal of comparing several popular NoSQL databases in simple and common use cases.  Thumbtack has led production implementations at client sites for all versions of the databases tested, and worked closely with each vendor over several months to ensure optimal configuration for each of the tests. 

Thumbtack Technology ran two classic use case scenarios.  The first emulated a typical application of 95% reads and 5% writes and the second emulated peak write loads, with 50% reads and 50% writes.  Thumbtack Technology provided the testing parameters to ensure that anyone wanting to replicate the tests is able to do so.  These include:

• Tested database versions: Couchbase 2.5.1, DataStax 2.0.9 and MongoDB 2.6.4
• Use of the Yahoo! Cloud Serving Benchmark
• Keeping 90% of the dataset in RAM to achieve the highest performance
• Running each database on dedicated hardware backed by SSD storage

Additional Resources

• Get the benchmark
• Read the NoSQL leaders blog
• Read the NoSQL benchmark blog
• Read the Thumbtack blog
• Learn more about Couchbase Server
• Read why Viber replaced MongoDB with Couchbase for lower TCO and better performance
• Visit www.couchbase.com
• Follow @Couchbase on Twitter