DBMS > Firebase Realtime Database vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Firebase Realtime Database vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Microsoft SQL Server 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.

Cloud Firestore is an auto-scaling document database for storing, syncing, and querying data for mobile and web apps. It offers seamless integration with other Firebase and Google Cloud Platform products.

A high performance, column-oriented RDBMS, specifically developed to harness the massive parallelism of modern CPU and GPU hardware

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

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

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	7.85
Rank	#51	Overall
	#8	Document stores

Score	1.77
Rank	#141	Overall
	#65	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	4.64
Rank	#71	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Website

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

firebase.google.com/products/firestore

github.com/heavyai/heavydb
www.heavy.ai

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/database

firebase.google.com/docs/firestore

docs.heavy.ai

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Google

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

Microsoft

Timescale

Initial release

2012

2017

2016

1989

2017

Current release

5.10, January 2022

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

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Implementation language

C++ and CUDA

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

Linux
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

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

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

Android
gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

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

Supported programming languages

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

Go
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
Python

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
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'

yes, Firebase Rules & Cloud Functions

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

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, with Cloud Functions

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Round robin

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Using Cloud Dataflow

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

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 for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management. Security Rules for 3rd party authentication using Firebase Auth.

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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