DBMS > Firebase Realtime Database vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. RethinkDB vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Firebase Realtime Database vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. RethinkDB vs. TimescaleDB

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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.

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

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

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	15.00
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	829.80
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	2.84
Rank	#106	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Score	4.87
Rank	#74	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Website

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

rethinkdb.com

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/database

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

rethinkdb.com/docs

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Microsoft

The Linux Foundation

since July 2017

Timescale

Initial release

2012

1989

2009

2017

Current release

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

2.4.1, August 2020

2.13.0, November 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache Version 2

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.

Implementation language

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, binary, float, bool, date, geometry

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

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

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

Client-side triggers through changefeeds

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

Sharding

range based

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

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

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.

yes

User concepts

Access control

yes, based on authentication and database rules

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes

users and table-level permissions

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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