DBMS > Firebase Realtime Database vs. Geode vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Firebase Realtime Database vs. Geode vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Snowflake

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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.

Geode is a distributed data container, pooling memory, CPU, network resources, and optionally local disk across multiple processes

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

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

Primary database model

column oriented

Secondary database models

Document store

If a column is of type dynamic docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/scalar-data-types/dynamic then it's possible to add arbitrary JSON documents in this cell
Event Store

this is the general usage pattern at Microsoft. Billing, Logs, Telemetry events are stored in ADX and the state of an individual entity is defined by the arg_max(timestamps)
Spatial DBMS
Search engine

support for complex search expressions docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/parseoperator FTS, Geospatial docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/geo-point-to-geohash-function distributed search -> ADX acts as a distributed search engine
Time Series DBMS

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer/time-series-analysis

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

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	1.92
Rank	#131	Overall
	#23	Key-value stores

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

geode.apache.org

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/database

geode.apache.org/docs

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Originally developed by Gemstone. They outsourced the project to Apache in 2015 but still deliver a commercial version as Gemfire.

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2012

2002

2019

2014

Current release

1.1, February 2017

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2; commercial licenses available as Gemfire

commercial

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

Java

Server operating systems

hosted

All OS with a Java VM

the JDK (8 or later) is also required

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

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

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

bool, datetime, dynamic, guid, int, long, real, string, timespan, double: docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/scalar-data-types

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

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language (OQL)

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

APIs and other access methods

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

Java Client API
Memcached protocol
RESTful HTTP API

Microsoft SQL Server communication protocol (MS-TDS)
RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

.Net
All JVM based languages
C++
Groovy
Java
Scala

.Net
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PowerShell
Python
R

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

user defined functions

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

user defined functions

Triggers

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

Cache Event Listeners

yes

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/management/updatepolicy

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service. Replication either local, cross-facility or geo-redundant.

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Spark connector (open source): github.com/Azure/azure-kusto-spark

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

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

yes, on a single node

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

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

Access rights per client and object definable

Azure Active Directory Authentication

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

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