DBMS > Firebase Realtime Database vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. MySQL vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Firebase Realtime Database vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. MySQL vs. Snowflake

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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.

Widely used open source RDBMS

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial 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	1083.74
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.mysql.com

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/database

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

dev.mysql.com/doc

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Google

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2012

2017

1995

2014

Current release

8.4.0, April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

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Implementation language

C and C++

Server operating systems

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

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

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
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

yes

proprietary syntax

user defined functions

Triggers

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

yes

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

yes

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

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

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 (IAM)

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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