DBMS > Amazon Redshift vs. Firebird vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Graphite vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Amazon Redshift vs. Firebird vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Graphite vs. TimescaleDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Large scale data warehouse service for use with business intelligence tools

Firebird is an open source RDBMS forked from Borland's InterBase

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.

Data logging and graphing tool for time series data

The storage layer (fixed size database) is called Whisper

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Relational DBMS

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

Score	16.88
Rank	#35	Overall
	#22	Relational DBMS

Score	20.50
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	2.84
Rank	#100	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Score	4.83
Rank	#67	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Score	4.46
Rank	#71	Overall
	#5	Time Series DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/redshift

www.firebirdsql.org

cloud.google.com/spanner

github.com/graphite-project/graphite-web

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

graphite.readthedocs.io

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Amazon (based on PostgreSQL)

Firebird Foundation

Google

Chris Davis

Timescale

Initial release

2012

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2017

2006

2017

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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

C and C++

Python

Server operating systems

hosted

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

hosted

Linux
Unix

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Numeric data only

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

restricted

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

does not fully support an SQL-standard

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

HTTP API
Sockets

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

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

in Python

PSQL

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

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

none

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

none

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

none

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

informational only, not enforced by the system

yes

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Features a multi-generational MVCC architecture, readers do not block writers

yes

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

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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