DBMS > Firebase Realtime Database vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. MariaDB

System Properties Comparison Firebase Realtime Database vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. MariaDB

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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.

MySQL application compatible open source RDBMS, enhanced with high availability, security, interoperability and performance capabilities. MariaDB ColumnStore provides a column-oriented storage engine and MariaDB Xpand supports distributed SQL.

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS

with OQGraph storage engine
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	15.00
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	2.89
Rank	#105	Overall
	#53	Relational DBMS

Score	93.81
Rank	#13	Overall
	#9	Relational DBMS

Website

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

cloud.google.com/spanner

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/database

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

Developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Google

MariaDB Corporation Ab (MariaDB Enterprise),
MariaDB Foundation (community MariaDB Server)

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

Initial release

2012

2017

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

Current release

11.3.2, February 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription 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

C and C++

Server operating systems

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

with proprietary extensions

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Supported programming languages

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Eiffel
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

yes

PL/SQL compatibility added with version 10.3

Triggers

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

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

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

Transaction concepts

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

yes

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

not for in-memory storage engine

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

with MEMORY storage engine

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)

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

MariaDB is the most powerful open source relational database – modern SQL and JSON...
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Competitive advantages

MariaDB Servers have many features unavailable in other open source relational databases....
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Typical application scenarios

Web, SaaS and Cloud operational applications that require high availability, scalability...
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Key customers

Deutsche Bank, DBS Bank, Nasdaq, Red Hat, ServiceNow, Verizon and Walgreens Featured...
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Market metrics

MariaDB is the default database in the LAMP stack supplied by Red Hat and SUSE Linux,...
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Licensing and pricing models

MariaDB plc subscriptions cover our free, open source database, Community Server,...
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