DBMS > Firebase Realtime Database vs. HarperDB vs. IBM Cloudant vs. MariaDB vs. YugabyteDB

System Properties Comparison Firebase Realtime Database vs. HarperDB vs. IBM Cloudant vs. MariaDB vs. YugabyteDB

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.

Ultra-low latency distributed database with an intuitive REST API supporting NoSQL and SQL (including joins). Deployment of functions and databases simultaneously with a consolidated node-level architecture.

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

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.

High-performance distributed SQL database for global, internet-scale applications. Wire and feature compatible with PostgreSQL.

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS

with OQGraph storage engine
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Wide column store

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

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	0.55
Rank	#248	Overall
	#38	Document stores

Score	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	93.21
Rank	#13	Overall
	#9	Relational DBMS

Score	2.91
Rank	#102	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Website

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.harperdb.io

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

www.yugabyte.com

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/database

docs.harperdb.io/docs

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

docs.yugabyte.com
github.com/yugabyte/yugabyte-db

Developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

HarperDB

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

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

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

Yugabyte Inc.

Initial release

2012

2017

2010

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

2017

Current release

3.1, August 2021

11.3.2, February 2024

2.19, September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free community edition available

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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.

STACKIT MariaDB offers MariaDB in a fully managed version in enterprise grade, 100% GDPR-compliant.

YugabyteDB Managed is the fully managed database-as-a-service offering of YugabyteDB. Get started quickly, and effortlessly ensure continuous availability and limitless scale of your cloud native applications.

Implementation language

Node.js

Erlang

C and C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
OS X

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

Linux
OS X

Data scheme

schema-free

dynamic schema

schema-free

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

depending on used data model

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON data types

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

SQL-like data manipulation statements

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes, PostgreSQL compatible

APIs and other access methods

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC
React Hooks
RESTful HTTP/JSON API
WebSocket

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

JDBC
YCQL, an SQL-based flexible-schema API with its roots in Cassandra Query Language
YSQL - a fully relational SQL API that is wire compatible with the SQL language in PostgreSQL

Supported programming languages

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

.Net
C
C#
C++
ColdFusion
D
Dart
Delphi
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lisp
MatLab
Objective C
Perl
PHP
PowerShell
Prolog
Python
R
Ruby
Rust
Scala
Swift

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

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

C
C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby
Rust
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

Custom Functions

since release 3.1

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

yes

PL/SQL compatibility added with version 10.3

yes

sql, plpgsql, C

Triggers

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

A table resides as a whole on one (or more) nodes in a cluster

Sharding

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

Hash and Range Sharding, row-level geo-partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

the nodes on which a table resides can be defined

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Based on Raft distributed consensus protocol, minimum 3 replicas for continuous availability

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

Immediate Consistency

Strong consistency on writes and tunable consistency on reads

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

Atomic execution of specific operations

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

Distributed ACID with Serializable & Snapshot Isolation. Inspired by Google Spanner architecture.

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, using LMDB

yes

not for in-memory storage engine

yes

based on RocksDB

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 and roles

Access rights for users can be defined per database

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

MariaDB is the most powerful open source relational database – modern SQL and JSON...
» more

YugabyteDB is an open source distributed SQL database for cloud native transactional...
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Competitive advantages

MariaDB Servers have many features unavailable in other open source relational databases....
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PostgreSQL compatible: Get instantly productive with a PostgreSQL compatible RDBMS....
» more

Typical application scenarios

Web, SaaS and Cloud operational applications that require high availability, scalability...
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Systems of record and engagement for cloud native applications that require resilience,...
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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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2 Million+ lifetime clusters deployed, 6.5K+ GitHub stars, 7K YugabyteDB Community...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

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

Apache 2.0 license for the database
» more

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