DBMS > Firebase Realtime Database vs. Firebird vs. Milvus vs. MongoDB vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Firebase Realtime Database vs. Firebird vs. Milvus vs. MongoDB 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

A DBMS designed for efficient storage of vector data and vector similarity searches

One of the most popular document stores available both as a fully managed cloud service and for deployment on self-managed infrastructure

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

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS
Search engine

integrated Lucene index, currently in MongoDB Atlas only.
Time Series DBMS

Time Series Collections introduced in Release 5.0
Vector DBMS

currently available in the MongoDB Atlas cloud service only

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	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	421.65
Rank	#5	Overall
	#1	Document stores

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/database

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

www.mongodb.com/docs/manual

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Firebird Foundation

MongoDB, Inc

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2012

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2019

2009

2014

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

2.3.4, January 2024

6.0.7, June 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

MongoDB Inc.'s Server Side Public License v1. Prior versions were published under GNU AGPL v3.0. Commercial licenses are also available.

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

MongoDB available as DBaaS (MongoDB Atlas)

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

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Implementation language

C and C++

C++, Go

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Although schema-free, documents of the same collection often follow the same structure. Optionally impose all or part of a schema by defining a JSON schema.

yes

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

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

yes

string, integer, double, decimal, boolean, date, object_id, geospatial

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

Read-only SQL queries via the MongoDB Atlas SQL Interface

yes

APIs and other access methods

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

RESTful HTTP API

GraphQL
HTTP REST
Prisma
proprietary protocol using JSON

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++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Actionscript

unofficial driver
C
C#
C++
Clojure

unofficial driver
ColdFusion

unofficial driver
D

unofficial driver
Dart

unofficial driver
Delphi

unofficial driver
Erlang
Go
Groovy

unofficial driver
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Kotlin
Lisp

unofficial driver
Lua

unofficial driver
MatLab

unofficial driver
Perl
PHP
PowerShell

unofficial driver
Prolog

unofficial driver
Python
R

unofficial driver
Ruby
Rust
Scala
Smalltalk

unofficial driver
Swift

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

PSQL

JavaScript

user defined functions

Triggers

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

in MongoDB Atlas only

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Partitioned by hashed, ranged, or zoned sharding keys. Live resharding allows users to change their shard keys as an online operation with zero downtime.

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

Multi-Source deployments with MongoDB Atlas Global Clusters
Source-replica replication

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Eventual Consistency

can be individually decided for each read operation
Immediate Consistency

default behaviour

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

typically not used, however similar functionality with DBRef possible

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

ACID

Multi-document ACID Transactions with snapshot isolation

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

optional, enabled by default

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

In-memory storage engine introduced with MongoDB version 3.2

User concepts

Access control

yes, based on authentication and database rules

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

Access rights for users and roles

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Milvus is an open-source and cloud-native vector database built for production-ready...
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MongoDB provides an integrated suite of cloud database and data services to accelerate...
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Competitive advantages

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
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Built around the flexible document data model and unified API, MongoDB is a developer...
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Typical application scenarios

RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
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AI-enriched intelligent apps (Continental, Telefonica, Iron Mountain) Internet of...
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Key customers

Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
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ADP, Adobe, Amadeus, AstraZeneca, Auto Trader, Barclays, BBVA, Bosch, Cisco, CERN,...
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Market metrics

As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
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Hundreds of millions downloads, over 150,000+ Atlas clusters provisioned every month...
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Licensing and pricing models

Milvus was released under the open-source Apache License 2.0 in October 2019. Fully-managed...
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MongoDB database server: Server-Side Public License (SSPL) . Commercial licenses...
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