DBMS > Alibaba Cloud PolarDB vs. Citus vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Alibaba Cloud PolarDB vs. Citus vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Snowflake

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A cloud-native relational database compatible with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle. Designed for business critical applications.

Scalable hybrid operational and analytics RDBMS for big data use cases based on PostgreSQL

Cloud-hosted realtime document store. iOS, Android, and JavaScript clients share one Realtime Database instance and automatically receive updates with the newest data.

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

DB-Engines Ranking measures the popularity of database management systems
Trend Chart

Score	0.82
Rank	#205	Overall
	#97	Relational DBMS

Score	2.13
Rank	#117	Overall
	#56	Relational DBMS

Score	13.60
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	133.72
Rank	#7	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

www.alibabacloud.com/product/polardb

www.citusdata.com

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/polardb/product-overview

docs.citusdata.com

firebase.google.com/docs/database

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Alibaba

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2010

2012

2014

Current release

8.1, December 2018

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Implementation language

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

XML support

Some form of processing data in XML format, e.g. support for XML data structures, and/or support for XPath, XQuery or XSLT.

yes

specific XML type available, but no XML query functionality

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

standard, with numerous extensions

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Java
Python

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

limited functionality with using 'rules'

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

ACID

yes

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes, based on authentication and database rules

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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Typical application scenarios

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Licensing and pricing models

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