Performance Evaluation of NoSQL Document Databases: Couchbase, CouchDB, and MongoDB

Abstract

NoSQL document databases emerged as an alternative to relational databases for managing large volumes of data. NoSQL document databases ensure big data storage and good query performance and are essential when the data scheme does not fit into the scheme of relational databases. They store their data in the form of documents and can handle unstructured, semi-structured, and structured data. This work evaluates the top three open-source NoSQL document databases: Couchbase, CouchDB, and MongoDB with Yahoo! Cloud Serving Benchmark (YCSB), which has become a standard for NoSQL database evaluation. The performance and scale-up of document databases are assessed using YCSB workloads with a different number of records and threads, where the runtime is measured for each database. In the experimental evaluation, we concluded that MongoDB is the database with the best runtime, except for the workload composed by scan operations. In addition, we identified CouchDB as the database with the best scale-up when varying the number of threads.