DBMS > Apache Impala vs. Couchbase vs. Firebird vs. H2GIS vs. Realm

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. Couchbase vs. Firebird vs. H2GIS vs. Realm

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

A distributed document store with integrated cache, a powerful search engine, in-built operational and analytical capabilities, and an embedded mobile database

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

Spatial extension of H2

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

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store

Key-value store

originating from the former Membase product and supporting the Memcached protocol
Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	13.77
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#7	Spatial DBMS

Score	7.60
Rank	#52	Overall
	#9	Document stores

Website

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

docs.couchbase.com

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

www.h2gis.org/docs/home

realm.io/docs

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Couchbase, Inc.

Firebird Foundation

CNRS

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

Initial release

2013

2011

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2013

2014

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

Server: 7.2, June 2023; Mobile: 3.1, March 2022; Couchbase Capella (DBaaS), June 2023

5.0.0, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

Business Source License (BSL 1.1); Commercial licenses also available

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

LGPL 3.0

Open Source

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C++

C, C++, Go and Erlang

C and C++

Java

Server operating systems

Linux

Linux
OS X
Windows

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Android
Backend: server-less
iOS
Windows

Data scheme

yes

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

SQL++, extends ANSI SQL to JSON for operational, transactional, and analytic use cases

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

CLI Client
HTTP REST
Kafka Connector
Native language bindings for CRUD, Query, Search and Analytics APIs
Spark Connector
Spring Data

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Java

.Net
Java

with Android only
Objective-C
React Native
Swift

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

Functions and timers in JavaScript and UDFs in Java, Python, SQL++

PSQL

yes

based on H2

runs within the applications so server-side scripts are unnecessary

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

Change Listeners

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Automatic Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication

yes

based on H2

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

query execution via MapReduce

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

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

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

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

Ephemeral buckets

yes

In-Memory realm

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users, groups and roles

based on Apache Sentry and Kerberos

User and Administrator separation with password-based and LDAP integrated Authentication. Role-base access control.

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

yes

based on H2

yes

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