DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Amazon SimpleDB vs. Firebird vs. IBM Cloudant

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Amazon SimpleDB vs. Firebird vs. IBM Cloudant

Please select another system to include it in the comparison.

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Hosted, scalable database service by Amazon with the data stored in Amazons cloud

Hosted simple database service by Amazon, with the data stored in the Amazon Cloud.

There is an unrelated product called SimpleDB developed by Edward Sciore

Firebird is an open source RDBMS forked from Borland's InterBase

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Key-value store

Relational DBMS

Document store

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

Score	74.07
Rank	#17	Overall
	#3	Document stores
	#2	Key-value stores

Score	1.85
Rank	#138	Overall
	#24	Key-value stores

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

aws.amazon.com/simpledb

www.firebirdsql.org

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

docs.aws.amazon.com/simpledb

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

Developer

Amazon

Firebird Foundation

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Initial release

2012

2007

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2010

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

commercial

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

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 and C++

Erlang

Server operating systems

hosted

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

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

All columns are indexed automatically

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Erlang
Java
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding must be implemented in the application

none

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

ACID across one or more tables within a single AWS account and region

Concurrent data updates can be detected by the application

ACID

atomic operations within a document possible

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Features a multi-generational MVCC architecture, readers do not block writers

yes

Optimistic locking

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.

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users and roles can be defined via the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

Access rights for users can be defined per database

More information provided by the system vendor

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.