DBMS > Firebase Realtime Database vs. GBase vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Oracle vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Firebase Realtime Database vs. GBase vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Oracle vs. TimescaleDB

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.

Widely used RDBMS in China, including analytical, transactional, distributed transactional, and cloud-native data warehousing.

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Widely used RDBMS

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
RDF store

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
Spatial DBMS

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
Vector DBMS

since Oracle 23

Relational DBMS

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

Score	13.64
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	1.05
Rank	#186	Overall
	#86	Relational DBMS

Score	2.75
Rank	#104	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Score	1244.08
Rank	#1	Overall
	#1	Relational DBMS

Score	4.46
Rank	#71	Overall
	#5	Time Series DBMS

Website

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.gbase.cn

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

www.oracle.com/database

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/database

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

docs.oracle.com/en/database

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

General Data Technology Co., Ltd.

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Oracle

Timescale

Initial release

2012

2004

2010

1980

2017

Current release

GBase 8a, GBase 8s, GBase 8c

23c, September 2023

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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

C, Java, Python

Erlang

C and C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

hosted

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows
z/OS

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

Schemaless in JSON and XML columns

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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

Standard with numerous extensions

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
C API
JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

JDBC
ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

C
C#
C++
Clojure
Cobol
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Fortran
Groovy
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Objective C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Tcl
Visual Basic

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

user defined functions

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

PL/SQL

also stored procedures in Java possible

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

horizontal partitioning (by range, list and hash) and vertical partitioning

Sharding

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

can be realized in PL/SQL

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

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

ACID

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

isolation level can be parameterized

ACID

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.

yes

Version 12c introduced the new option 'Oracle Database In-Memory'

User concepts

Access control

yes, based on authentication and database rules

yes

Access rights for users can be defined per database

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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