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

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

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

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.

Open-source Time Series DBMS and monitoring system

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

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

Score	74.45
Rank	#17	Overall
	#3	Document stores
	#2	Key-value stores

Score	13.64
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	2.84
Rank	#100	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Score	7.69
Rank	#50	Overall
	#3	Time Series DBMS

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

cloud.google.com/spanner

prometheus.io

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

firebase.google.com/docs/database

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

prometheus.io/docs

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Amazon

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Google

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2012

2017

2015

2001

Current release

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

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++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Numeric data only

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.

Import of XML data possible

Secondary indexes

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

RESTful 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

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net
C++
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Ruby

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

yes

by Federation

none

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

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Immediate Consistency

none

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

yes

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

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)

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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