DBMS > Firebase Realtime Database vs. GigaSpaces vs. RocksDB vs. Snowflake vs. VoltDB

System Properties Comparison Firebase Realtime Database vs. GigaSpaces vs. RocksDB vs. Snowflake vs. VoltDB

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.

High performance in-memory data grid platform, powering three products: Smart Cache, Smart ODS (Operational Data Store), Smart Augmented Transactions

Embeddable persistent key-value store optimized for fast storage (flash and RAM)

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

Distributed In-Memory NewSQL RDBMS

Used for OLTP applications with a high frequency of relatively simple transactions, that can hold all their data in memory

Primary database model

Document store

Document store
Object oriented DBMS

Values are user defined objects

Key-value store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Graph DBMS
Search engine

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

Score	13.64
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	1.03
Rank	#188	Overall
	#32	Document stores
	#6	Object oriented DBMS

Score	3.41
Rank	#86	Overall
	#11	Key-value stores

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	1.47
Rank	#157	Overall
	#73	Relational DBMS

Website

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/database

docs.gigaspaces.com/latest/landing.html

github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.voltdb.com

Developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Gigaspaces Technologies

Facebook, Inc.

Snowflake Computing Inc.

VoltDB Inc.

Initial release

2012

2000

2013

2014

2010

Current release

15.5, September 2020

9.2.1, May 2024

11.3, April 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2; Commercial licenses available

Open Source

BSD

commercial

Open Source

AGPL for Community Edition, commercial license for Enterprise, AWS, and Pro Editions

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, C++, .Net

C++

Java, C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

Linux

hosted

Linux
OS X

for development

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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

yes

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.

XML can be used for describing objects metadata

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-99 for query and DML statements

yes

only a subset of SQL 99

APIs and other access methods

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

GigaSpaces LRMI
Hibernate
JCache
JDBC
JPA
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data

C++ API
Java API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Java API
JDBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

.Net
C++
Java
Python
Scala

C
C++
Go
Java
Perl
Python
Ruby

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C#
C++
Erlang

not officially supported
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

yes

user defined functions

Java

Triggers

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes, event driven architecture

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

yes

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

synchronous or asynchronous
Source-replica replication

synchronous or asynchronous

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Map-Reduce pattern can be built with XAP task executors

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

Consistency level configurable: ALL, QUORUM, ANY

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

FOREIGN KEY constraints are not supported

Transaction concepts

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

yes

ACID

yes

ACID

Transactions are executed single-threaded within stored procedures

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Data access is serialized by the server

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Snapshots and command logging

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

Role-based access control

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

Users and roles with access to stored procedures

More information provided by the system vendor

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.