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

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

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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.

A fully ACID transactional, developer-friendly, multi-model DBMS

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

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

Score	13.43
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	2.56
Rank	#97	Overall
	#50	Relational DBMS

Score	1.08
Rank	#176	Overall
	#30	Document stores
	#16	Graph DBMS

Website

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

cloud.google.com/spanner

surrealdb.com

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/database

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

surrealdb.com/docs

Developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Google

SurrealDB Ltd

Initial release

2012

2017

2022

Current release

v1.5.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

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

Rust

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

SQL-like query language

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

GraphQL
RESTful HTTP API
WebSocket

Supported programming languages

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Deno
Go
JavaScript (Node.js)
Rust

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

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

Transaction concepts

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

yes

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

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)

yes, based on authentication and database rules

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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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