DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. LeanXcale vs. Realm vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. LeanXcale vs. Realm vs. TimescaleDB

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 highly scalable full ACID SQL database with fast NoSQL data ingestion and GIS capabilities

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

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Document store

Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Document store

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Relational 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	0.29
Rank	#291	Overall
	#41	Key-value stores
	#132	Relational DBMS

Score	7.60
Rank	#52	Overall
	#9	Document stores

Score	4.64
Rank	#71	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.leanxcale.com

realm.io

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

firebase.google.com/docs/database

realm.io/docs

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Amazon

Google

acquired by Google 2014

LeanXcale

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

Timescale

Initial release

2012

2015

2014

2017

Current release

2.15.0, May 2024

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

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Implementation language

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

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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

through Apache Derby

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
Kafka Connector
ODBC
proprietary key/value interface
Spark Connector

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

C
Java
Scala

.Net
Java

with Android only
Objective-C
React Native
Swift

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

runs within the applications so server-side scripts are unnecessary

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

Change Listeners

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

none

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

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

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

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.

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

yes

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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