Top 25 Distributed Databases

Day in day out, businesses generate petabytes of data. However, not all databases provide the flexibility, availability, and scalability required to keep up with the growing need to store and access these data.

A distributed database stores files and data across different physical locations on the same or disparate networks. Distributed database systems help you innovate and cope with growing data needs by scaling effortlessly.

Instead of limiting data storage and transaction processing to one machine, distributed database utilizes multiple machines across different locations. This, in turn, increases performance, data recovery, and general user experience.

This post highlights some of the top databases available for distributed data storage.

Apache Ignite

Apache Ignite is an open source, full-featured distributed database with in-memory speed and high-performance capabilities. It is famous for its use in data caching and offers durable, highly available, and consistent data persistence with scalable SQL support. It is a fast and intuitive distributed database solution with full support for external databases such as Cassandra.

Apache Cassandra

Initially developed by Facebook, Cassandra is a NoSQL distributed database that offers highly available and performant data storage. It is a scalable solution used by large tech companies, including Netflix, eBay, and Uber.

It is an operating system and platform-independent with resilience, security, and high availability that helps it process queries with low latency. It is an open source tool but also available through third-party vendors with commercial support services.

Apache HBase

Another distributed database service from Apache is the HBase-no-relational database solution for Apache Hadoop. It is a project modeled after Google's Bigtable to store large datasets in a scalable, consistent, and highly available manner.

Couchbase Server

Couchbase is an enterprise-scale distributed NoSQL database. It is an open source key-value database that provides the scalability and flexibility needed in the distributed cloud and edge environments. It is architectured to be highly performant and is ideal for use in the cloud, mobile, and edge computing applications.

AWS SimpleDB

As part of the Amazon web services, SimpleDB is a distributed database that integrates with other AWS services, including EC2 and Amazon S3. Some of its features include high availability, flexibility, efficiency, scalability, and like other AWS services, cost-efficiency. It eliminates operation complexity and uses a simple API for access and storage of data which are automatically indexed to reduce administrative burden.

It, however, has a weaker consistency and storage limitation compared to other distributed storage services available.

It is ideal for storing online games data, Indexing Amazon S3 objects pointers, and logging audits and analysis metrics.

Clusterpoint

Clusterpoint is a schema-free integrated database solution for distributed data. It is a robust data storage and querying solution with flexibility, scalability, high availability, and cost-effectiveness. It is ideal for storing data in financial services, healthcare, telecommunication, and other data-intensive industries.

FoundationDB

FoundationDB is an open source NoSQL distributed database with a multi-model data storage architecture.-allowing to store different data types in a single database. It is fault-tolerant and highly scalable with high performance for simple and heavy workloads. Thanks to its multi-model data storage, FoundationDB is ideal for many cases, including cloud and edge applications.

ETCD

ETCD is an open source key-value data storage solution for large-scale distributed systems information. It stores the configurations, state, and metadata for distributed environments like Kubernetes in a consistent and highly available manner. The CNCF project offers a simple interface that enables reads and writes using standard tools such as curl. It is ideal for storing critical information in production systems such as container schedulers, service discovery services, and Kubernetes.

TiDB

TiDB is an open source MySQL compatible database for distributed systems. It supports Hybrid Transactional and Analytical Processing workloads and provides horizontal scalability, strong consistency, and high availability. It is an open source cloud-native database built to store SQL data at scale and is used by various companies including Xiaomi, and Lenovo.

CockroachDB

CockroachDB is a cloud native commercial distributed database developed by Cockroach Labs. It is a distributed SQL database built for transactional and consistent key-value stores, highly compatible with cloud native applications with the speed and scalability of large datasets. CockroachDB stores SpaceX operational data and are ideal for low latency, resilient storage in global applications.

Shardingsphere

Shardingsphere is an Apache open source database project with multiple components to provide distributed transaction, distributed governance, and accessible data scaling in various use cases. It is a flexible and extensible database solution that integrates with plugins for extensive features, including data sharding, replica query, and database protocols.

Rqlite

Rqlite is a lightweight distributed relational database built on SQLite. It is a fully replicated storage system that can be used as central storage for critical relational data with node-to-node encryption to provide security for production-grade SQL data.

Yugabyte DB

YugabyteDB is an open source relational database for distributed data management. It is capable of storing extensive data across multiple availability zones to provide easy querying with low latency. It is a cloud native distributed database that iterates on the features of PostgreSQL with continuous availability and horizontal scalability.

Citus

Citus is an open source extension that helps you leverage PostgreSQL to provide a distributed database solution. It distributes extensive data across multiple nodes into PostgreSQL in a distributed, highly performant, and scalable manner. It is open source, managed, and utilizes all features of PostgreSQL.

Trino

Originally named PrestoSQL, Trino is a high-performance distributed SQL query engine that allows you to query data from multiple databases such as Cassandra and MongoDB. It is designed to be highly available and serve low-latency data at scale. It has a capability for use in Big Data and other analytical use cases.

CrateDB

CrateDB is an open source, highly optimized distributed SQL database. It has a shared-nothing system architecture with a hybrid data storage model. Its typical use case is in operational analytics applications and IoT data processing. It is a commercial database service with a free community edition.

EventQL

EventQL is a distributed SQL database to store large-scale data and analytics. It is a managed, cloud native storage system for storing and retrieving analytics data. With a column-oriented storage design, it offers high availability and scalability of data.

GhostDB

GhostDB is a fast distributed in-memory database for storing and querying data at scale. It is designed to deliver data with high speed in dynamic applications. It holds extensive data in key-value pairs and replicates it across multiple availability zones to ensure low latency retrievals.

Nebula Graph

Nebula Graph is an open source distributed database that provides reads and writes with low latency, high throughput, and high performance. It is a SQL-like database capable of hosting large-scale data while maintaining security, availability, and performance.

CondensationDB

CondensationDB is an immutable distributed data storage system built on top of Cryptography. It uses a zero-trust architecture to provide high data security, availability, and reliability. It is cloud-compatible and ideal for storing sensitive data and configurations.

Hibari

Hibari is a strongly consistent, distributed NoSQL key-value data storage system. It is a production-ready database with high consistency and availability. Written in Erlang, it is designed for fast and reliable data querying with replications that guarantee data durability in cases of system failure.

HerdDB

HerdDB is an embeddable SQL distributed database written in Java. It is designed to provide scalability, resilience, and data replication while ensuring consistent data availability with low latency and high throughput.

Justin DB

Justin DB is an open source, distributed, consistent NoSQL key-value database that ensures data availability. It is an improved implementation of Amazon DynamoDB with fault tolerance and resilience. It is built on Aka and leverages its load balancing, location transparency, and self-maintenance.

ZanredisDB

ZanredisDB is a Redis-compatible, fault-tolerant distributed key-value database system. It offers high consistency, scalability, and availability of data.