Couchbase Inc., has come out with guns blazing in response to recent research that claims rival MongoDB is streets ahead of its competitors in terms of scalability.

The company has revealed its own independent benchmark test results, which show that contrary to yesterday’s claims, Couchbase in fact outperforms both MongoDB, and another rival, Cassandra.

The research came less than 24 hours after MongoDB boasted it was the most superior NoSQL database when it comes to scalability, following the results of tests by benchmarking and performance-testing firm United Software Associated.

Couchbase was clearly both very upset with United Software’s claims, and ready to respond to them. Shane Johnson, the company’s senior product marketing manager, quickly penned a blog post criticizing United Software’s tests for a “lack of transparency”, at the same time posting the results of a different benchmark test from Avalon LLC, which it claims is a far more open and credible source.

Transparency matters

“Benchmarks are a useful tool to evaluate database performance. But to be useful, they must be transparent and repeatable,” wrote Johnson. “If they fail to meet these standards, the results are questionable.”

“In recent benchmarks, Couchbase and MongoDB took two different approaches,” Johnson continued. “Couchbase clearly documented the full configuration and included the results of every test. MongoDB did not.”

According to Avalon’s ‘better documented’ test results, Couchbase Server 3.0 demonstrated a 4.5 x performance advantage over MongoDB 3.0 with WiredTiger.

“Even with WiredTiger, MongoDB 3.0 delivered less than one-fourth the throughput rate of Couchbase Server 3.0 using the same resources,” the company said.

Bob Wiederhold, CEO of Couchbase, stated in prepared remarks that his company sees value in conducting transparent, repeatable benchmark tests.

“They make it easier for the market to see which NoSQL databases perform well on targeted use cases,” said Wiederhold.

Couchbase also revealed that in a new benchmark, Couchbase Server 3.0 showed it could sustain 1.1 million writes per second with low latency on Google Cloud Platform using just 50 nodes, while rival Cassandra required 300 nodes.

“The results show that to sustain one million writes per second on Couchbase would cost 83 per cent less than what it does on Cassandra – $56 per hour for Couchbase compared with $330 per hour for Cassandra,” the company claimed.

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