DBMS > Firebase Realtime Database vs. GraphDB vs. RethinkDB vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Firebase Realtime Database vs. GraphDB vs. RethinkDB 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.

Enterprise-ready RDF and graph database with efficient reasoning, cluster and external index synchronization support. It supports also SQL JDBC access to Knowledge Graph and GraphQL over SPARQL.

DBMS for the Web with a mechanism to push updated query results to applications in realtime.

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

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	3.32
Rank	#91	Overall
	#6	Graph DBMS
	#4	RDF stores

Score	2.74
Rank	#105	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.ontotext.com

rethinkdb.com

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/database

graphdb.ontotext.com/documentation

rethinkdb.com/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Social network pages

Developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Ontotext

The Linux Foundation

since July 2017

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2012

2000

2009

2014

Current release

10.4, October 2023

2.4.1, August 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Some plugins of GraphDB Workbench are open sourced

Open Source

Apache Version 2

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

Java

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

All OS with a Java VM
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support; RDF shapes

schema-free

yes

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

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, binary, float, bool, date, geometry

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

yes, supports real-time synchronization and indexing in SOLR/Elastic search/Lucene and GeoSPARQL geometry data indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

stored SPARQL accessed as SQL using Apache Calcite through JDBC/ODBC

yes

APIs and other access methods

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

GeoSPARQL
GraphQL
GraphQL Federation
Java API
JDBC
RDF4J API
RDFS
RIO
Sail API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL 1.1

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

.Net
C#
Clojure
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

community-supported driver
C#

community-supported driver
C++

community-supported driver
Clojure

community-supported driver
Dart

community-supported driver
Erlang

community-supported driver
Go

community-supported driver
Haskell

community-supported driver
Java

official driver
JavaScript (Node.js)

official driver
Lisp

community-supported driver
Lua

community-supported driver
Objective-C

community-supported driver
Perl

community-supported driver
PHP

community-supported driver
Python

official driver
Ruby

official driver
Scala

community-supported driver

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

well-defined plugin interfaces; JavaScript server-side extensibility

user defined functions

Triggers

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

Client-side triggers through changefeeds

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

range based

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

Source-replica replication

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

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 (configurable in cluster mode per master or individual client request)

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Constraint checking

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

ACID

Atomic single-document operations

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

MVCC based

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

Default Basic authentication through RDF4J client, or via Java when run with cURL, default token-based in the Workbench or via Rest API, optional access through OpenID or Kerberos single sign-on.

yes

users and table-level permissions

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Ontotext GraphDB is a semantic database engine that allows organizations to build...
» more

Competitive advantages

GraphDB allows you to link text and data in big knowledge graphs. It’s easy to experiment...
» more

Typical application scenarios

Metadata enrichment and management, linked data publishing, semantic inferencing...
» more

Key customers

GraphDB provides a platform for building next-generation AI and Knowledge Graph...
» more

Market metrics

GraphDB is the most utilized semantic triplestore for mission-critical enterprise...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

GraphDB Free is a non-commercial version and is free to use. GraphDB Enterprise edition...
» more

News

Case study: Policy Enforcement Automation With Semantics
2 May 2024

Okay, RAG… We Have a Problem
26 April 2024

Scaling Understanding with the Help of Feedback Loops, Knowledge Graphs and NLP
19 April 2024

How Knowledge Graphs Power Data Mesh and Data Fabric
10 April 2024

Building Smarter Financial Services: The Role of Semantic Technologies, Knowledge Graphs and Generative AI
3 April 2024

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and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.