DBMS > Couchbase vs. EXASOL vs. Firebird vs. GridGain vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. EXASOL vs. Firebird vs. GridGain vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

High-performance, in-memory, MPP database specifically designed for in-memory analytics.

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

GridGain is an in-memory computing platform, built on Apache Ignite

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

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

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

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

Score	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	1.99
Rank	#124	Overall
	#58	Relational DBMS

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	1.47
Rank	#154	Overall
	#26	Key-value stores
	#72	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

www.exasol.com/resources

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

www.gridgain.com/docs/index.html

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Exasol

Firebird Foundation

GridGain Systems, Inc.

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2011

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2007

2014

Current release

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

5.0.0, January 2024

GridGain 8.5.1

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Business Source License (BSL 1.1); Commercial licenses also 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, C++, Go and Erlang

C and C++

Java, C++, .Net

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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

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

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

ANSI-99 for query and DML statements, subset of DDL

yes

APIs and other access methods

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

.Net
JDBC
ODBC
WebSocket

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

HDFS API
Hibernate
JCache
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java
Lua
Python
R

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
C++
Java
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

user defined functions

PSQL

yes (compute grid and cache interceptors can be used instead)

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

yes (cache interceptors and events)

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

none

Sharding

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication

yes (replicated cache)

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Hadoop integration

yes (compute grid and hadoop accelerator)

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

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

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

User concepts

Access control

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

Access rights for users, groups and roles according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

Security Hooks for custom implementations

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

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