DBMS > Firebase Realtime Database vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Microsoft Access vs. SQLite vs. TimesTen

System Properties Comparison Firebase Realtime Database vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Microsoft Access vs. SQLite vs. TimesTen

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.

Microsoft Access combines a backend RDBMS (JET / ACE Engine) with a GUI frontend for data manipulation and queries.

The Access frontend is often used for accessing other datasources (DBMS, Excel, etc.)

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

In-Memory RDBMS compatible to Oracle

Primary database model

Document store

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	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	114.32
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Score	1.31
Rank	#163	Overall
	#74	Relational DBMS

Website

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/access

www.sqlite.org

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/timesten.html

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/database

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

docs.oracle.com/database/timesten-18.1

Developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Google

Microsoft

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Oracle, TimesTen Performance Software, HP

originally founded in HP Labs it was acquired by Oracle in 2005

Initial release

2012

2017

1992

2000

1998

Current release

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

3.45.3 (15 April 2024), April 2024

11 Release 2 (11.2.2.8.0)

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

Open Source

Public Domain

commercial

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++

Server operating systems

hosted

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

server-less

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris SPARC/x86
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

dynamic column types

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

yes

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
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

JDBC
ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

Supported programming languages

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java (JDBC-ODBC)
VBA
Visual Basic.NET

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

C
C++
Java
PL/SQL

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

PL/SQL

Triggers

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

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.

none

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

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

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

but no files for transaction logging

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

via file-system locks

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

but no files for transaction logging

yes

by means of logfiles and checkpoints

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 (IAM)

a simple user-level security was built in till version Access 2003

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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