DBMS > Firebase Realtime Database vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Heroic vs. STSdb

System Properties Comparison Firebase Realtime Database vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Heroic vs. STSdb

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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.

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.

Time Series DBMS built at Spotify based on Cassandra or Google Cloud Bigtable, and ElasticSearch

Key-Value Store with special method for indexing

optimized for high performance using a special indexing method

Primary database model

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

Score	13.64
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	2.84
Rank	#100	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Score	0.46
Rank	#265	Overall
	#22	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.10
Rank	#357	Overall
	#51	Key-value stores

Website

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

cloud.google.com/spanner

github.com/spotify/heroic

github.com/STSSoft/STSdb4

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/database

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

spotify.github.io/heroic

Developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Google

Spotify

STS Soft SC

Initial release

2012

2017

2014

2011

Current release

4.0.8, September 2015

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

GPLv2, commercial license available

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

Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

primitive types and user defined types (classes)

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

via Elasticsearch

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

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

HQL (Heroic Query Language, a JSON-based language)
HTTP API

.NET Client API

Supported programming languages

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C#
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

Triggers

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

yes

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google 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

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

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

Transaction concepts

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

yes

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

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.

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)

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More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

Cloud-based DBMS's popularity grows at high rates
12 December 2019, Paul Andlinger

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Recent citations in the news

Realtime vs Cloud Firestore: Which Firebase Database to go?
8 March 2024, Appinventiv

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