DBMS > Apache Phoenix vs. Citus vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. MySQL vs. Realm

System Properties Comparison Apache Phoenix vs. Citus vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. MySQL vs. Realm

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A scale-out RDBMS with evolutionary schema built on Apache HBase

Scalable hybrid operational and analytics RDBMS for big data use cases based on PostgreSQL

Cloud-hosted realtime document store. iOS, Android, and JavaScript clients share one Realtime Database instance and automatically receive updates with the newest data.

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

Relational DBMS

Document store

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Document store

Secondary database models

Document store

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	1.97
Rank	#126	Overall
	#59	Relational DBMS

Score	2.21
Rank	#118	Overall
	#56	Relational DBMS

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	1083.74
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	7.60
Rank	#52	Overall
	#9	Document stores

Website

phoenix.apache.org

www.citusdata.com

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.mysql.com

realm.io

Technical documentation

phoenix.apache.org

docs.citusdata.com

firebase.google.com/docs/database

dev.mysql.com/doc

realm.io/docs

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

Initial release

2014

2010

2012

1995

2014

Current release

5.0-HBase2, July 2018 and 4.15-HBase1, December 2019

8.1, December 2018

8.4.0, April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

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

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Aiven for MySQL: Fully managed MySQL, deployable in the cloud of your choice, with seamless integrations and lightning-fast setup.

Implementation language

Java

C and C++

Server operating systems

Linux
Unix
Windows

Linux

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Android
Backend: server-less
iOS
Windows

Data scheme

yes

late-bound, schema-on-read capabilities

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.

yes

specific XML type available, but no XML query functionality

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

standard, with numerous extensions

yes

with proprietary extensions

APIs and other access methods

JDBC

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

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Go
Groovy
Java
PHP
Python
Scala

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

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

user defined functions

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

limited functionality with using 'rules'

yes

proprietary syntax

runs within the applications so server-side scripts are unnecessary

Triggers

yes

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

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Hadoop integration

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

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

yes

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

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 Control Lists (using HBase ACL) for RBAC, integration with Apache Ranger for RBAC & ABAC, multi-tenancy

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes, based on authentication and database rules

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

yes

More information provided by the system vendor

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.