DBMS > CouchDB vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Firebird vs. Hive vs. SAP HANA

System Properties Comparison CouchDB vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Firebird vs. Hive vs. SAP HANA

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A native JSON - document store inspired by Lotus Notes, scalable from globally distributed server-clusters down to mobile phones.

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

data warehouse software for querying and managing large distributed datasets, built on Hadoop

In-memory, column based data store. Available as appliance or cloud service

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

Document store
Graph DBMS

with SAP Hana, Enterprise Edition
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	8.30
Rank	#47	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	13.64
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	20.50
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	59.76
Rank	#18	Overall
	#12	Relational DBMS

Score	44.27
Rank	#23	Overall
	#16	Relational DBMS

Website

couchdb.apache.org

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.firebirdsql.org

hive.apache.org

www.sap.com/products/hana.html

Technical documentation

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

firebase.google.com/docs/database

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/Hive/Home

help.sap.com/hana

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Damien Katz, a former Lotus Notes developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Firebird Foundation

Apache Software Foundation

initially developed by Facebook

SAP

Initial release

2005

2012

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2012

2010

Current release

3.3.3, December 2023

5.0.0, January 2024

3.1.3, April 2022

2.0 SPS07 (April 4, 2023), April 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

Apache Version 2

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

also available as a cloud based service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

Erlang

C and C++

Java

Server operating systems

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

Appliance or cloud-service

Data scheme

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

via views

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift

JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C
C#
ColdFusion
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
Ruby
Smalltalk

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C++
Java
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

limited functionality with using 'rules'

PSQL

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

SQLScript, R

Triggers

yes

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

none

Sharding

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication

selectable replication factor

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

query execution via MapReduce

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

atomic operations within a single document possible

yes

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

yes

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

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

Access rights for users can be defined per database

yes, based on authentication and database rules

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

Access rights for users, groups and roles

yes

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