DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Citus vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Google Cloud Spanner

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Citus vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Google Cloud Spanner

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

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.

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

Document store
Key-value store

Relational DBMS

Document store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

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	2.21
Rank	#118	Overall
	#56	Relational DBMS

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

www.citusdata.com

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

cloud.google.com/spanner

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

docs.citusdata.com

firebase.google.com/docs/database

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

Developer

Amazon

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Google

Initial release

2012

2010

2012

2017

Current release

8.1, December 2018

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

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

schema-free

yes

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.

yes

specific XML type available, but no XML query functionality

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

standard, with numerous extensions

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

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

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

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

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

limited functionality with using 'rules'

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

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

ACID

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

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.

User concepts

Access control

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes, based on authentication and database rules

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

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