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

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

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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.

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

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

Primary database model

Search engine

Document store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	134.78
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	15.00
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	2.84
Rank	#106	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Score	123.20
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

rethinkdb.com

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

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

firebase.google.com/docs/database

rethinkdb.com/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Elastic

Google

acquired by Google 2014

The Linux Foundation

since July 2017

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2010

2012

2009

2014

Current release

8.6, January 2023

2.4.1, August 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2

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

Java

C++

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

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

schema-free

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, binary, float, bool, date, geometry

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

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

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

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

limited functionality with using 'rules'

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

Client-side triggers through changefeeds

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

range based

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Source-replica replication

yes

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

Atomic single-document operations

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

MVCC based

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.

Memcached and Redis integration

User concepts

Access control

yes, based on authentication and database rules

yes

users and table-level permissions

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

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