DBMS > Couchbase vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. GigaSpaces vs. RocksDB vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. GigaSpaces vs. RocksDB 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

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

High performance in-memory data grid platform, powering three products: Smart Cache, Smart ODS (Operational Data Store), Smart Augmented Transactions

Embeddable persistent key-value store optimized for fast storage (flash and RAM)

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

Primary database model

Document store

Document store
Object oriented DBMS

Values are user defined objects

Key-value store

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

Graph DBMS
Search engine

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

Score	16.59
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	13.64
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	1.03
Rank	#188	Overall
	#32	Document stores
	#6	Object oriented DBMS

Score	3.41
Rank	#86	Overall
	#11	Key-value stores

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

www.couchbase.com

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.gigaspaces.com

rocksdb.org

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

firebase.google.com/docs/database

docs.gigaspaces.com/latest/landing.html

github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Gigaspaces Technologies

Facebook, Inc.

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2011

2012

2000

2013

2014

Current release

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

15.5, September 2020

9.2.1, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Business Source License (BSL 1.1); Commercial licenses also available

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2; Commercial licenses available

Open Source

BSD

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

Java, C++, .Net

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

Linux

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.

XML can be used for describing objects metadata

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

SQL-99 for query and DML statements

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

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

GigaSpaces LRMI
Hibernate
JCache
JDBC
JPA
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data

C++ API
Java API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

.Net
C++
Java
Python
Scala

C
C++
Go
Java
Perl
Python
Ruby

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

limited functionality with using 'rules'

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes, event driven architecture

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication

synchronous or asynchronous
Source-replica replication

synchronous or asynchronous

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Map-Reduce pattern can be built with XAP task executors

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable: ALL, QUORUM, ANY

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

yes

ACID

yes

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

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.

yes, based on authentication and database rules

Role-based access control

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

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