Apache AsterixDB vs DocumentDB

Apache AsterixDB is a free, open source, self-managed Big Data Management System for ingesting, storing, indexing, querying and analyzing data. Its Asterix Data Model extends JSON with object-database concepts, while SQL++ and AQL provide declarative queries for semistructured information. Partitioned LSM-based storage supports B+ tree, R-tree and inverted keyword secondary indexes. External datasets can be queried without loading everything into AsterixDB, using adapters for HDFS and local filesystems. Continuous feeds can ingest sources such as Twitter, RSS and sockets. The HTTP query API accepts SQL++ and can return immediate, deferred or asynchronous results. Installation options include NCService, Ansible and Amazon Web Services. The Hyracks parallel runtime has been scale-tested on up to 1000+ cores and 500+ disks. Documentation describes basic transactional concurrency and recovery, and identifies web data warehousing and social data analysis as suitable uses.

DocumentDB is an MIT-licensed, open-source document database built on PostgreSQL for MongoDB compatibility. It stores native BSON documents, supports document CRUD and PostgreSQL SQL operations, and offers single-field, multi-key, compound, text and geospatial indexes, including nested fields. Pgvector powers vector search for embeddings and similarity search. MongoDB-compatible clients and tools include mongosh, PyMongo, the official MongoDB Node.js driver and a VS Code extension. The extension can create a local database, generate credentials and save a connection. DocumentDB runs locally in Docker or on a user’s infrastructure or cloud. Its gateway supports SCRAM-SHA-256 authentication, with TLS terminating at default port 10260. Hosted packages currently cover Ubuntu 24.04 and EL9 with PostgreSQL 17 or 18 for amd64 and arm64. A Kubernetes operator for failover, replication, backups and TLS is in preview and requires Kubernetes 1.35+ and cert-manager.