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

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

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

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.

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

Primary database model

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

Score	0.26
Rank	#301	Overall
	#12	Wide column stores

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	0.78
Rank	#213	Overall
	#4	Spatial DBMS

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

www.alibabacloud.com/product/table-store

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.geomesa.org

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/tablestore

firebase.google.com/docs/database

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

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Alibaba

Google

acquired by Google 2014

CCRi and others

Google

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2016

2012

2014

2017

2014

Current release

5.0.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

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

Scala

Server operating systems

hosted

Data scheme

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

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

APIs and other access methods

HTTP API

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Java
Python

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

user defined functions

Triggers

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

depending on storage layer

Sharding

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

depending on storage layer

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

yes

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

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

yes

Transaction concepts

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

Atomic single-row operations

yes

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

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.

depending on storage layer

User concepts

Access control

Access rights based on subaccounts and tokens

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)

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

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