DBMS > Firebase Realtime Database vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. GridGain vs. QuestDB vs. SQLite

System Properties Comparison Firebase Realtime Database vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. GridGain vs. QuestDB vs. SQLite

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.

A horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service. It is the externalization of the core Google database that runs the biggest aspects of Google, like Ads and Google Play.

GridGain is an in-memory computing platform, built on Apache Ignite

A high performance open source SQL database for time series data

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Relational DBMS

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

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	1.47
Rank	#154	Overall
	#26	Key-value stores
	#72	Relational DBMS

Score	2.52
Rank	#109	Overall
	#9	Time Series DBMS

Score	114.32
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Website

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.gridgain.com

questdb.io

www.sqlite.org

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/database

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

www.gridgain.com/docs/index.html

questdb.io/docs

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

Developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Google

GridGain Systems, Inc.

QuestDB Technology Inc

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Initial release

2012

2017

2007

2014

2000

Current release

GridGain 8.5.1

3.45.3 (15 April 2024), April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Public Domain

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

Java (Zero-GC), C++, Rust

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
macOS
Windows

server-less

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free via InfluxDB Line Protocol

yes

dynamic column types

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

ANSI-99 for query and DML statements, subset of DDL

SQL with time-series extensions

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

APIs and other access methods

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

HDFS API
Hibernate
JCache
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data

HTTP REST
InfluxDB Line Protocol (TCP/UDP)
JDBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

Supported programming languages

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C#
C++
Java
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

PostgreSQL driver
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Rust

over HTTP

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

yes (compute grid and cache interceptors can be used instead)

Triggers

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes (cache interceptors and events)

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

horizontal partitioning (by timestamps)

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

yes (replicated cache)

Source-replica replication with eventual consistency

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

yes (compute grid and hadoop accelerator)

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

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

ACID for single-table writes

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

via file-system locks

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

through memory mapped files

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 (IAM)

Security Hooks for custom implementations

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Relational model with native time series support Column-based storage and time partitioned...
» more

Competitive advantages

High ingestion throughput: peak of 4M rows/sec (TSBS Benchmark) Code optimizations...
» more

Typical application scenarios

Financial tick data Industrial IoT Application Metrics Monitoring
» more

Key customers

Banks & Hedge funds, Yahoo, OKX, Airbus, Aquis Exchange, Net App, Cloudera, Airtel,...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Open source Apache 2.0 QuestDB Enterprise QuestDB Cloud
» more

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