DBMS > BigObject vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Firebird vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

System Properties Comparison BigObject vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Firebird vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Analytic DBMS for real-time computations and queries

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

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

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

a hierachical model (tree) can be imposed

Document store

Relational DBMS

Document store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	0.19
Rank	#329	Overall
	#146	Relational DBMS

Score	13.64
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	20.50
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	2.75
Rank	#104	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Score	27.71
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Website

bigobject.io

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.firebirdsql.org

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

Technical documentation

docs.bigobject.io

firebase.google.com/docs/database

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

Developer

BigObject, Inc.

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Firebird Foundation

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Microsoft

Initial release

2015

2012

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2010

2014

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free community edition available

commercial

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

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++

Erlang

Server operating systems

Linux

distributed as a docker-image
OS X

distributed as a docker-image (boot2docker)
Windows

distributed as a docker-image (boot2docker)

hosted

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON 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.

Secondary indexes

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

fluentd
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

Supported programming languages

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Lua

limited functionality with using 'rules'

PSQL

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

JavaScript

Triggers

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

JavaScript

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

none

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Eventual Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

automatically between fact table and dimension tables

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

ACID

atomic operations within a document possible

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Read/write lock on objects (tables, trees)

yes

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

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

User concepts

Access control

yes, based on authentication and database rules

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

Access rights for users can be defined per database

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

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.