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

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

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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

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.

DBMS for the Web with a mechanism to push updated query results to applications in realtime.

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Document store

Relational DBMS

Document store

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	77.57
Rank	#16	Overall
	#2	Document stores
	#2	Key-value stores

Score	15.00
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	2.89
Rank	#105	Overall
	#53	Relational DBMS

Score	2.84
Rank	#106	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

cloud.google.com/spanner

rethinkdb.com

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

firebase.google.com/docs/database

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

rethinkdb.com/docs

Developer

Amazon

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Google

The Linux Foundation

since July 2017

Initial release

2012

2017

2009

Current release

2.4.1, August 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2

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
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, binary, float, bool, date, geometry

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

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

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

community-supported driver
C#

community-supported driver
C++

community-supported driver
Clojure

community-supported driver
Dart

community-supported driver
Erlang

community-supported driver
Go

community-supported driver
Haskell

community-supported driver
Java

official driver
JavaScript (Node.js)

official driver
Lisp

community-supported driver
Lua

community-supported driver
Objective-C

community-supported driver
Perl

community-supported driver
PHP

community-supported driver
Python

official driver
Ruby

official driver
Scala

community-supported driver

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

Client-side triggers through changefeeds

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

range based

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

Source-replica 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

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

Atomic single-document operations

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

MVCC based

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)

yes

users and table-level permissions

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