DBMS > Firebase Realtime Database vs. Firebird vs. GridGain vs. SAP IQ vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Firebase Realtime Database vs. Firebird vs. GridGain vs. SAP IQ vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

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

GridGain is an in-memory computing platform, built on Apache Ignite

Columnar RDBMS optimized for Big Data analytics

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

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

column-oriented

Relational DBMS

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

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

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

Score	2.75
Rank	#104	Overall
	#53	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.firebirdsql.org

www.gridgain.com

www.sap.com/products/technology-platform/sybase-iq-big-data-management.html

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/database

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

www.gridgain.com/docs/index.html

help.sap.com/docs/SAP_IQ

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Firebird Foundation

GridGain Systems, Inc.

SAP, formerly Sybase

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2012

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2007

1994

2014

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

GridGain 8.5.1

16.1 SPS04, April 2019

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

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Implementation language

C and C++

Java, C++, .Net

Server operating systems

hosted

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

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

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
C++
Java
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C
C#
C++
Java
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

PSQL

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

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

yes (cache interceptors and events)

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

shared disk or shared nothing architectures with SAP IQ Multiplexer

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

yes (replicated cache)

SAP/Sybase Replication Server

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes (compute grid and hadoop accelerator)

Hadoop integration

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

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

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

yes, based on authentication and database rules

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

Security Hooks for custom implementations

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

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