DBMS > FileMaker vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. STSdb

System Properties Comparison FileMaker vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. STSdb

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

FileMaker is a cross-platform RDBMS that includes a GUI frontend.

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

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Key-Value Store with special method for indexing

optimized for high performance using a special indexing method

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Key-value store

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	48.20
Rank	#20	Overall
	#14	Relational DBMS

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	29.04
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	0.04
Rank	#360	Overall
	#52	Key-value stores

Website

www.claris.com/filemaker

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

github.com/STSSoft/STSdb4

Technical documentation

www.claris.com/resources/documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/database

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

Developer

Claris

a subsidiary of Apple

Google

acquired by Google 2014

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Microsoft

STS Soft SC

Initial release

1983

2012

2010

2014

2011

Current release

19.4.1, November 2021

4.0.8, September 2015

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

GPLv2, commercial license available

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

Erlang

Server operating systems

iOS

client part only
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

yes

primitive types and user defined types (classes)

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

A http query request can return the data in XML format

Secondary indexes

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

via plugins

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

Filemaker WebDirect
JDBC
ODBC

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

.NET Client API

Supported programming languages

PHP

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

C#
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

limited functionality with using 'rules'

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

JavaScript

Triggers

yes

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

JavaScript

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication, warm standby

since Version 14

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Eventual Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

atomic operations within a document possible

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

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.

User concepts

Access control

simple rights management via user accounts and connection to external directory services

yes, based on authentication and database rules

Access rights for users can be defined per database

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

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.