DBMS > Couchbase vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Google Cloud Datastore vs. RethinkDB

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Google Cloud Datastore vs. RethinkDB

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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.

Automatically scaling NoSQL Database as a Service (DBaaS) on the Google Cloud Platform

DBMS for the Web with a mechanism to push updated query results to applications in realtime.

Primary database model

Document store

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

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	4.47
Rank	#76	Overall
	#12	Document stores

Score	2.74
Rank	#105	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Website

www.couchbase.com

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

cloud.google.com/datastore

rethinkdb.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

firebase.google.com/docs/database

cloud.google.com/datastore/docs

rethinkdb.com/docs

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Google

The Linux Foundation

since July 2017

Initial release

2011

2012

2008

2009

Current release

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

2.4.1, August 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2

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++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes, details here

yes

string, binary, float, bool, date, geometry

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

SQL

Support of SQL

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

SQL-like query language (GQL)

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

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

.Net
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

community-supported driver
C#

community-supported driver
C++

community-supported driver
Clojure

community-supported driver
Dart

community-supported driver
Erlang

community-supported driver
Go

community-supported driver
Haskell

community-supported driver
Java

official driver
JavaScript (Node.js)

official driver
Lisp

community-supported driver
Lua

community-supported driver
Objective-C

community-supported driver
Perl

community-supported driver
PHP

community-supported driver
Python

official driver
Ruby

official driver
Scala

community-supported driver

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

limited functionality with using 'rules'

using Google App Engine

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

Callbacks using the Google Apps Engine

Client-side triggers through changefeeds

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

range based

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication using Paxos

Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

yes

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 or Eventual Consistency depending on type of query and configuration

Strong Consistency is default for entity lookups and queries within an Entity Group (but can instead be made eventually consistent). Other queries are always eventual consistent.

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

via ReferenceProperties or Ancestor paths

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

yes

ACID

Serializable Isolation within Transactions, Read Committed outside of Transactions

Atomic single-document operations

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

MVCC based

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

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

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

yes

users and table-level permissions

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