Should I use CouchDB or SimpleDB?

Question

I'm creating an application that will be hosted on amazon EC2 and a lot of the data that'll be saved is more document oriented (as well as saving tweets and such related to those documents).

Right now I'm at a crossroads... should I use simpleDB or couchDB? Whats the pros/cons of using either? Should I just try both for a month and decide then?

Sebaceous

Answer 1

You may find the the article Amazon SimpleDB and CouchDB Compared to be useful.

I've also found that MongoDB gives excellent performance.

Emeric

+1 for MongoDB. Can't install Erlang on my server/iPhone client but a C++ library for a Document based DB is encouraging. – Sorus

Answer 2

Keep in mind that if your code lives in EC2, SimpleDB will be presumably hosted in the same data center that your code is, which would give SimpleDB a lower latency than CouchDB for requests from an EC2 server. Also, Amazon doesn't charge you bandwidth costs between EC2 and SimpleDB.

I would expect SimpleDB to be both faster and cheaper for code running in EC2, for those reasons.

Ruelas

It depends, since CouchDB would presumably be hosted on EC2 as well it might even be faster than SimpleDB. – Anstus

I was assuming that CouchDB has its own host, as SimpleDB does. If that's not the case, then you're right - download CouchDB and host it in EC2 yourself, and the latency/charge issues go away. – Ruelas

Answer 3

SimpleDB is hosted and maintained by Amazon for you, CouchDB is all up to you. That's the big difference.

Forward

Answer 4

I would absolutely do some benchmark of the two solutions with your own use-case, if that's possible, i.e. if you can build a reasonable subset of your application to run on either databases (they have quite different APIs so this might not be easy).

Anstus

Answer 5

If you develop in .Net environment there's an excellent lib for SimpleDB called Simple Savant which really eases the integration..

Claimant

Answer 6

I've built some live solutions using SimpleDB and it works very well, especially with a caching layer in front of it (cf memcached et al). However I've recently started scoping out a new project and have decided to move to CouchDB for the primary reason of having control over the data.

As your commitment to SimpleDB grows, it gets harder and harder to migrate away to anything else (ah the joys of vendor lock in) and, frankly, that just isn't great for our business.

I remain a strong evangelist of cloud tech, and Amazon in particular, but I feel a lot better running couchdb on EC2 than I do with SimpleDB.

Roger

Hungerford