DBMS > Couchbase vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. Realm vs. VoltDB

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. Realm vs. VoltDB

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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 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.

A DBMS built for use on mobile devices that’s a fast, easy to use alternative to SQLite and Core Data

Distributed In-Memory NewSQL RDBMS

Used for OLTP applications with a high frequency of relatively simple transactions, that can hold all their data in memory

Primary database model

Document 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

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

Score	16.59
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	7.36
Rank	#53	Overall
	#9	Document stores

Score	7.41
Rank	#52	Overall
	#8	Document stores

Score	1.47
Rank	#157	Overall
	#73	Relational DBMS

Website

www.couchbase.com

firebase.google.com/products/firestore

realm.io

www.voltdb.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

firebase.google.com/docs/firestore

realm.io/docs

docs.voltdb.com

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Google

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

VoltDB Inc.

Initial release

2011

2017

2014

2010

Current release

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

11.3, April 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

commercial

Open Source

AGPL for Community Edition, commercial license for Enterprise, AWS, and Pro Editions

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++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Android
Backend: server-less
iOS
Windows

Linux
OS X

for development

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

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

only a subset of SQL 99

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

Java API
JDBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

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

.Net
Java

with Android only
Objective-C
React Native
Swift

C#
C++
Erlang

not officially supported
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

yes, Firebase Rules & Cloud Functions

runs within the applications so server-side scripts are unnecessary

Java

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes, with Cloud Functions

yes

Change Listeners

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

none

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication

none

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

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

selectable on a per-operation basis

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

FOREIGN KEY constraints are not supported

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

yes

ACID

Transactions are executed single-threaded within stored procedures

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Data access is serialized by the server

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Snapshots and command logging

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

Ephemeral buckets

yes

In-Memory realm

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 based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management. Security Rules for 3rd party authentication using Firebase Auth.

yes

Users and roles with access to stored procedures

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