DBMS > Altibase vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. IBM Db2 vs. PlanetScale vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Altibase vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. IBM Db2 vs. PlanetScale vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

An enterprise grade, high-performance RDBMS

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

Common in IBM host environments, 2 different versions for host and Windows/Linux

Scalable, distributed, serverless MySQL database platform built on top of Vitess

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

Relational DBMS

Since Version 10.5 support for JSON/BSON documents compatible with MongoDB

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
RDF store

in Db2 LUW (Linux, Unix, Windows)
Spatial DBMS

with Db2 Spatial Extender

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	1.07
Rank	#186	Overall
	#87	Relational DBMS

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	128.46
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	1.59
Rank	#151	Overall
	#70	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

altibase.com

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.ibm.com/products/db2

planetscale.com

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

github.com/ALTIBASE/Documents/tree/master/Manuals

firebase.google.com/docs/database

www.ibm.com/docs/en/db2

planetscale.com/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Altibase

Google

acquired by Google 2014

IBM

PlanetScale

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

1999

2012

1983

host version

2020

2014

Current release

v7.3, 2023, August 2023

12.1, October 2016

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open source edition discontinued with March 2023

commercial

free version is 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

C++

C and C++

Server operating systems

AIX
HP-UX
Linux

hosted

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Windows
z/OS

Docker
Linux
macOS

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

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

ANSI SQL-92

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
JSON style queries

MongoDB compatible
ODBC
XQuery

ADO.NET
JDBC
MySQL protocol
ODBC

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C
C++
Java

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

C
C#
C++
Cobol
Delphi
Fortran
Java
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Visual Basic

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

stored procedures and stored functions

limited functionality with using 'rules'

yes

proprietary syntax

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

only with Windows/Unix/Linux Version

Sharding

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

with separate tools (MQ, InfoSphere)

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

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

Eventual Consistency across shards
Immediate Consistency within a shard

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

yes

ACID

ACID at shard level

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

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

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