DBMS > EXASOL vs. Firebird vs. Google Cloud Bigtable vs. GridGain vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison EXASOL vs. Firebird vs. Google Cloud Bigtable vs. GridGain vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

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

Google's NoSQL Big Data database service. It's the same database that powers many core Google services, including Search, Analytics, Maps, and Gmail.

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

Relational DBMS

Key-value store
Wide column store

Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	1.99
Rank	#124	Overall
	#58	Relational DBMS

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	3.26
Rank	#92	Overall
	#13	Key-value stores
	#8	Wide column stores

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

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

www.exasol.com

www.firebirdsql.org

cloud.google.com/bigtable

www.gridgain.com

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

www.exasol.com/resources

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs

www.gridgain.com/docs/index.html

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Exasol

Firebird Foundation

Google

GridGain Systems, Inc.

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2015

2007

2014

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

GridGain 8.5.1

License

Commercial or Open Source

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 and C++

Java, C++, .Net

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

hosted

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

yes

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

yes

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

yes

APIs and other access methods

.Net
JDBC
ODBC
WebSocket

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
HappyBase (Python library)
HBase compatible API (Java)

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Java
Lua
Python
R

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C#
C++
Java
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

PSQL

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

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

yes (cache interceptors and events)

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

Internal replication in Colossus, and regional replication between two clusters in different zones

yes (replicated cache)

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Hadoop integration

yes

yes (compute grid and hadoop accelerator)

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Immediate consistency (for a single cluster), Eventual consistency (for two or more replicated clusters)

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Atomic single-row operations

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

User concepts

Access control

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

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

Security Hooks for custom implementations

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

More information provided by the system vendor

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.