DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. IBM Cloudant vs. MySQL vs. Realm

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. IBM Cloudant vs. MySQL vs. Realm

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.

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Widely used open source RDBMS

A DBMS built for use on mobile devices that’s a fast, easy to use alternative to SQLite and Core Data

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Document store

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Document store

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial 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	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	1083.74
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	7.60
Rank	#52	Overall
	#9	Document stores

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

www.mysql.com

realm.io

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

firebase.google.com/docs/database

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

dev.mysql.com/doc

realm.io/docs

Developer

Amazon

Google

acquired by Google 2014

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

Initial release

2012

2010

1995

2014

Current release

8.4.0, April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

Open Source

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

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Implementation language

Erlang

C and C++

Server operating systems

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Android
Backend: server-less
iOS
Windows

Data scheme

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

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

with proprietary extensions

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

.Net
Java

with Android only
Objective-C
React Native
Swift

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

yes

proprietary syntax

runs within the applications so server-side scripts are unnecessary

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

Change Listeners

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

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

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

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

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

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.

yes

In-Memory realm

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 can be defined per database

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

yes

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