DBMS > Firebase Realtime Database vs. MariaDB vs. RDF4J vs. SQLite vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison Firebase Realtime Database vs. MariaDB vs. RDF4J vs. SQLite vs. Weaviate

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.

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.

RDF4J is a Java framework for processing RDF data, supporting both memory-based and a disk-based storage.

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

An AI-native realtime vector database engine that integrates scalable machine learning models.

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS

with OQGraph storage engine
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	13.60
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	83.44
Rank	#15	Overall
	#10	Relational DBMS

Score	0.72
Rank	#222	Overall
	#9	RDF stores

Score	103.35
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Score	1.48
Rank	#149	Overall
	#8	Vector DBMS

Website

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

rdf4j.org

www.sqlite.org

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/database

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

rdf4j.org/documentation

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

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

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

Since 2016 officially forked into an Eclipse project, former developer was Aduna Software.

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2012

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

2004

2000

2019

Current release

11.5.2, August 2024

3.46.1 (13 August 2024), August 2024

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription available

Open Source

Eclipse Distribution License (EDL), v1.0.

Open Source

Public Domain

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate Enterprise

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.

Implementation language

C and C++

Java

Server operating systems

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

server-less

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

yes

RDF Schemas

yes

dynamic column types

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

yes

string, int, float, geo point, date, cross reference, fuzzy references

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

all data objects are indexed in a semantic vector space (the Contextionary), all primitive fields are indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Java API
RIO

RDF Input/Output
Sail API
SeRQL

Sesame RDF Query Language
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

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

Java
PHP
Python

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

yes

PL/SQL compatibility added with version 10.3

yes

Triggers

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

none

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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

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

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

Isolation support depends on the API used

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

via file-system locks

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

not for in-memory storage engine

yes

in-memory storage is supported as well

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

with MEMORY storage engine

yes

User concepts

Access control

yes, based on authentication and database rules

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

MariaDB is the most powerful open source relational database – modern SQL and JSON...
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Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
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Competitive advantages

MariaDB Servers have many features unavailable in other open source relational databases....
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Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
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Typical application scenarios

Web, SaaS and Cloud operational applications that require high availability, scalability...
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As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
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Key customers

Deutsche Bank, DBS Bank, Nasdaq, Red Hat, ServiceNow, Verizon and Walgreens Featured...
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All companies that have data.
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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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As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
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Licensing and pricing models

MariaDB plc subscriptions cover our free, open source database, Community Server,...
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Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
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