DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. PostgreSQL vs. RethinkDB

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. PostgreSQL vs. RethinkDB

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A distributed, RESTful modern search and analytics engine based on Apache Lucene

Elasticsearch lets you perform and combine many types of searches such as structured, unstructured, geo, and metric

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

Widely used open source RDBMS

Developed as objectoriented DBMS (Postgres), gradually enhanced with 'standards' like SQL

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

Primary database model

Search engine

Document store

Relational DBMS

with object oriented extensions, e.g.: user defined types/functions and inheritance. Handling of key/value pairs with hstore module.

Document store

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

with Apache Age
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

with pgvector extension

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	135.35
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	645.54
Rank	#4	Overall
	#4	Relational DBMS

Score	2.74
Rank	#105	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.postgresql.org

rethinkdb.com

Technical documentation

www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/index.html

firebase.google.com/docs/database

www.postgresql.org/docs

rethinkdb.com/docs

Developer

Elastic

Google

acquired by Google 2014

PostgreSQL Global Development Group

www.postgresql.org/developer

The Linux Foundation

since July 2017

Initial release

2010

2012

1989

1989: Postgres, 1996: PostgreSQL

2009

Current release

8.6, January 2023

16.3, May 2024

2.4.1, August 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

Open Source

BSD

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

Java

C++

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
NetBSD
OpenBSD
OS X
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

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.

yes

specific XML-type available, but no XML query functionality.

Secondary indexes

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

standard with numerous extensions

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

.Net
Groovy
Community Contributed Clients
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

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

yes

limited functionality with using 'rules'

user defined functions

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

Client-side triggers through changefeeds

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

partitioning by range, list and (since PostgreSQL 11) by hash

Sharding

range based

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

ACID

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.

Memcached and Redis integration

User concepts

Access control

yes, based on authentication and database rules

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes

users and table-level permissions

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.

Related products and services

3rd parties

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Navicat for PostgreSQL is an easy-to-use graphical tool for PostgreSQL database development.
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Navicat Monitor is a safe, simple and agentless remote server monitoring tool for PostgreSQL and many other database management systems.
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Fujitsu Enterprise Postgres: An Enterprise Grade PostgreSQL with the flexibility of a hybrid cloud solution combined with industry leading security, availability and performance.
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More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

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Conferences, events and webinars

more DBMS events

Monitoring PostgreSQL with Redgate Monitor
Webinar, 10-11am CT / 4-5pm BST, 22 May 2024

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