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

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

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 Operational and Transactional Enterprise NoSQL Document Database

A fully ACID transactional, developer-friendly, multi-model DBMS

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Document store

Relational DBMS

Document store

Document store
Graph DBMS

Secondary database models

Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

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	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	2.92
Rank	#101	Overall
	#18	Document stores

Score	0.86
Rank	#203	Overall
	#34	Document stores
	#18	Graph DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

cloud.google.com/spanner

ravendb.net

surrealdb.com

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

firebase.google.com/docs/database

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

ravendb.net/docs

surrealdb.com/docs

Developer

Amazon

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Google

Hibernating Rhinos

SurrealDB Ltd

Initial release

2012

2017

2010

2022

Current release

5.4, July 2022

v1.1.1, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

commercial

Open Source

AGPL version 3, commercial license available

Open Source

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

Rust

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
macOS
Raspberry Pi
Windows

Linux
macOS
Windows

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

SQL-like query language (RQL)

SQL-like query language

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

.NET Client API
F# Client API
Go Client API
Java Client API
NodeJS Client API
PHP Client API
Python Client API
RESTful HTTP API

GraphQL
RESTful HTTP API
WebSocket

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#
F#
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

Deno
Go
JavaScript (Node.js)
Rust

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

yes

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

Multi-source replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

yes

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

Default ACID transactions on the local node (eventually consistent across the cluster). Atomic operations with cluster-wide ACID transactions. Eventual consistency for indexes and full-text search indexes.

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

ACID, Cluster-wide transaction available

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.

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)

Authorization levels configured per client per database

yes, based on authentication and database rules

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.