DBMS > Firebase Realtime Database vs. Interbase vs. MySQL vs. RethinkDB

System Properties Comparison Firebase Realtime Database vs. Interbase vs. MySQL vs. RethinkDB

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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.

Light-weight proven RDBMS

originally from Borland

Widely used open source RDBMS

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

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Document store

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	15.00
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	5.04
Rank	#71	Overall
	#39	Relational DBMS

Score	1087.72
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	2.84
Rank	#106	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Website

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

www.mysql.com

rethinkdb.com

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/database

docs.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

dev.mysql.com/doc

rethinkdb.com/docs

Developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Embarcadero

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

The Linux Foundation

since July 2017

Initial release

2012

1984

1995

2009

Current release

InterBase 2020, December 2019

8.3.0, January 2024

2.4.1, August 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Android
iOS
Linux
OS X
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, binary, float, bool, date, geometry

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.

export as XML data possible

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

with proprietary extensions

APIs and other access methods

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Supported programming languages

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java
Object Pascal
PHP
Ruby

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

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

yes

Interbase procedure and trigger language

yes

proprietary syntax

Triggers

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

Client-side triggers through changefeeds

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

Sharding

range based

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Interbase Change Views

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

Transaction concepts

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

yes

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

Atomic single-document operations

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Multiversion concurreny control

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

yes

MVCC based

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

yes

users and table-level permissions

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