DBMS > CouchDB vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. HarperDB vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison CouchDB vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. HarperDB vs. Snowflake

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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 Firestore is an auto-scaling document database for storing, syncing, and querying data for mobile and web apps. It offers seamless integration with other Firebase and Google Cloud Platform products.

Ultra-low latency distributed database with an intuitive REST API supporting NoSQL and SQL (including joins). Deployment of functions and databases simultaneously with a consolidated node-level architecture.

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

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

Score	9.30
Rank	#45	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	7.85
Rank	#51	Overall
	#8	Document stores

Score	0.55
Rank	#248	Overall
	#38	Document stores

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

couchdb.apache.org

firebase.google.com/products/firestore

www.harperdb.io

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

firebase.google.com/docs/firestore

docs.harperdb.io/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

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

Google

HarperDB

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2005

2017

2014

Current release

3.3.3, December 2023

3.1, August 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

free community edition available

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

Erlang

Node.js

Server operating systems

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Linux
OS X

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

dynamic schema

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON data types

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

Secondary indexes

yes

via views

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like data manipulation statements

yes

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Android
gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC
React Hooks
RESTful HTTP/JSON API
WebSocket

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

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

Go
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
Python

.Net
C
C#
C++
ColdFusion
D
Dart
Delphi
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lisp
MatLab
Objective C
Perl
PHP
PowerShell
Prolog
Python
R
Ruby
Rust
Scala
Swift

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

yes, Firebase Rules & Cloud Functions

Custom Functions

since release 3.1

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

yes, with Cloud Functions

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

Sharding

A table resides as a whole on one (or more) nodes in a cluster

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication

yes

the nodes on which a table resides can be defined

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Using Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

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

Atomic execution of specific operations

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, using LMDB

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

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management. Security Rules for 3rd party authentication using Firebase Auth.

Access rights for users and roles

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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