DBMS > Firebase Realtime Database vs. FoundationDB vs. IRONdb vs. MySQL vs. Trafodion

System Properties Comparison Firebase Realtime Database vs. FoundationDB vs. IRONdb vs. MySQL vs. Trafodion

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market. As a consequence, the product was removed from the DB-Engines ranking. In April 2018, Apple open-sourced FoundationDB and it therefore reappears in the ranking.

IRONdb seems to be discontinued. Therefore it is excluded from the DB-Engines Ranking.

Apache Trafodion has been retired in 2021. Therefore it is excluded from the DB-Engines Ranking.

Description

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

Ordered key-value store. Core features are complimented by layers.

A distributed Time Series DBMS with a focus on scalability, fault tolerance and operational simplicity

Widely used open source RDBMS

Transactional SQL-on-Hadoop DBMS

Primary database model

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	1.03
Rank	#190	Overall
	#31	Document stores
	#28	Key-value stores
	#89	Relational DBMS

Score	1083.74
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Website

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

github.com/apple/foundationdb

www.circonus.com/solutions/time-series-database/

www.mysql.com

trafodion.apache.org

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/database

apple.github.io/foundationdb

docs.circonus.com/irondb/category/getting-started

dev.mysql.com/doc

trafodion.apache.org/documentation.html

Developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

FoundationDB

Circonus LLC.

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Apache Software Foundation, originally developed by HP

Initial release

2012

2013

2017

1995

2014

Current release

6.2.28, November 2020

V0.10.20, January 2018

8.4.0, April 2024

2.3.0, February 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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++

C and C++

C++, Java

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

some layers support schemas

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

some layers support typing

yes

text, numeric, histograms

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

supported in specific SQL layer only

SQL-like query language (Circonus Analytics Query Language: CAQL)

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

APIs and other access methods

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

.Net
C
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lisp
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Rust
Scala

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/ADO.Net

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

in SQL-layer only

yes, in Lua

yes

proprietary syntax

Java Stored Procedures

Triggers

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Automatic, metric affinity per node

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

configurable replication factor, datacenter aware

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes, via HBase

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

via user defined functions and HBase

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Linearizable consistency

Immediate consistency per node, eventual consistency across nodes

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

in SQL-layer only

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

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

no user groups or roles

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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