Azure Cosmos DB vs Couchbase

• Turn-key geo-redundancy with multi-master writes is unprecedented and unparalleled in the industry!
• Guaranteed low latency makes Cosmos DB an excellent fit for most of our performance-intensive situations.
• The tunable consistency model simplifies so many challenges in distributed systems engineering that otherwise require advanced knowledge of computer science topics. I continue to be impressed at how Cosmos DB has abstracted away so much complexity.

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• Couchbase performance is exceptional both for in-memory and persisted transactions.
• Handling of node failures and cluster rebalancing (high availability).
• Enterprise support from Couchbase themselves
• Good documentation
• Streaming of bucket (database) level mutations via their Database Change Protocol (DCP).
• Replication of datasets between native clients and Couchbase buckets
• Handling of simultaneous writes to the same record with performance penalties

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• Expensive, so be careful of the use case.
• We had a thought time migrating from traditional DBs to Cosmos. Azure should provide a seamless platform for the migration of data from on-premises to cloud.

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• The N1QL engine performs poorly compared to SQL engines due to the number of interactions needed, so if your use case involves the need for a lot of SQL-like query activity as opposed to the direct fetch of data in the form of a key/value map you may want to consider a RDBMS that has support for json data types so that you can more easily mix the use of relational and non-relational approaches to data access.
• You have to be careful when using multiple capabilities (e.g. transactions with Sync Gateway) as you will typically run into problems where one technology may not operate correctly in combination with another.
• There are quality problems with some newly released features, so be careful with being an early adopter unless you really need the capability. We somewhat desperately adopted the use of transactions, but went through multiple bughunt cycles with Couchbase working the kinks out.

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• Azure Cosmos DB may be expensive on its own, but it was cheaper than increasing the size/power of our VMs running SQL Server instances enough to keep up with the volume and velocity of the unstructured data.
• We got the JSON data out of our SQL Servers and they quit tipping over.

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• Great performance.
• Leading Couchbase Lite capabilities for mobile use.
• Developers' learning curve with replica reads and multi cluster can be long. Needs guidance and nurturing.
• Cluster maintenance during OS patching, etc. has multiple ways to approach. Operational teams may need some guidance.

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