DBMS > Alibaba Cloud Table Store vs. Couchbase vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. GeoMesa vs. Google Cloud Spanner

System Properties Comparison Alibaba Cloud Table Store vs. Couchbase vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. GeoMesa vs. Google Cloud Spanner

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A fully managed Wide Column Store for large quantities of semi-structured data with real-time access

A distributed document store with integrated cache, a powerful search engine, in-built operational and analytical capabilities, and an embedded mobile database

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

GeoMesa is a distributed spatio-temporal DBMS based on various systems as storage layer.

A horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service. It is the externalization of the core Google database that runs the biggest aspects of Google, like Ads and Google Play.

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Key-value store

originating from the former Membase product and supporting the Memcached protocol
Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

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

Score	0.31
Rank	#297	Overall
	#11	Wide column stores

Score	16.59
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	13.64
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	0.86
Rank	#205	Overall
	#4	Spatial DBMS

Score	2.84
Rank	#100	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Website

www.alibabacloud.com/product/table-store

www.couchbase.com

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.geomesa.org

cloud.google.com/spanner

Technical documentation

www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/tablestore

docs.couchbase.com

firebase.google.com/docs/database

www.geomesa.org/documentation/stable/user/index.html

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

Developer

Alibaba

Couchbase, Inc.

Google

acquired by Google 2014

CCRi and others

Google

Initial release

2016

2011

2012

2014

2017

Current release

Server: 7.2, June 2023; Mobile: 3.1, March 2022; Couchbase Capella (DBaaS), June 2023

5.0.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Business Source License (BSL 1.1); Commercial licenses also available

commercial

Open Source

Apache License 2.0

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

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Scala

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL++, extends ANSI SQL to JSON for operational, transactional, and analytic use cases

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

APIs and other access methods

HTTP API

CLI Client
HTTP REST
Kafka Connector
Native language bindings for CRUD, Query, Search and Analytics APIs
Spark Connector
Spring Data

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

Java
Python

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Functions and timers in JavaScript and UDFs in Java, Python, SQL++

limited functionality with using 'rules'

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Automatic Sharding

depending on storage layer

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

depending on storage layer

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

depending on storage layer

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integrity

Transaction concepts

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

Atomic single-row operations

ACID

yes

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

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

Ephemeral buckets

depending on storage layer

User concepts

Access control

Access rights based on subaccounts and tokens

User and Administrator separation with password-based and LDAP integrated Authentication. Role-base access control.

yes, based on authentication and database rules

yes

depending on the DBMS used for storage

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

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