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

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

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

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

Spark SQL is a component on top of 'Spark Core' for structured data processing

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Document store

Relational 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	2.73
Rank	#108	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	7.71
Rank	#52	Overall
	#9	Document stores

Score	19.15
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

realm.io

spark.apache.org/sql

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

firebase.google.com/docs/database

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

realm.io/docs

spark.apache.org/docs/latest/sql-programming-guide.html

Developer

Amazon

Google

acquired by Google 2014

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

Apache Software Foundation

Initial release

2012

2010

2014

Current release

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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

Erlang

Scala

Server operating systems

hosted

Android
Backend: server-less
iOS
Windows

Linux
OS X
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.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

.Net
Java

with Android only
Objective-C
React Native
Swift

Java
Python
R
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

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

none

yes, utilizing Spark Core

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

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

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

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.

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

yes

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