DBMS > Firebase Realtime Database vs. Postgres-XL vs. Riak KV vs. Snowflake vs. TerminusDB

System Properties Comparison Firebase Realtime Database vs. Postgres-XL vs. Riak KV vs. Snowflake vs. TerminusDB

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.

Based on PostgreSQL enhanced with MPP and write-scale-out cluster features

Distributed, fault tolerant key-value store

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

Scalable Graph Database platform making enterprise data available by exploiting inferred entities and relationships

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

with links between data sets and object tags for the creation of secondary indexes

Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

Document store
RDF store

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

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	0.49
Rank	#256	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Score	4.10
Rank	#82	Overall
	#9	Key-value stores

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	0.17
Rank	#325	Overall
	#29	Graph DBMS

Website

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.postgres-xl.org

www.snowflake.com

terminusdb.com

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/database

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

www.tiot.jp/riak-docs/riak/kv/latest

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

terminusdb.github.io/terminusdb/#

Developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

OpenSource, formerly Basho Technologies

Snowflake Computing Inc.

DataChemist Ltd.

Initial release

2012

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

2009

2014

2018

Current release

10 R1, October 2018

3.2.0, December 2022

11.0.0, January 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Mozilla public license

Open Source

Apache version 2, commercial enterprise edition

commercial

Open Source

GPL V3

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

Erlang

Prolog, Rust

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
macOS

Linux
OS X

hosted

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

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

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

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

XML type, but no XML query functionality

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

restricted

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

yes

SQL-like query language (WOQL)

APIs and other access methods

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

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

HTTP API
Native Erlang Interface

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

OWL
RESTful HTTP API
WOQL (Web Object Query Language)

Supported programming languages

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Erlang
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

unofficial client library
C#
C++

unofficial client library
Clojure

unofficial client library
Dart

unofficial client library
Erlang
Go

unofficial client library
Groovy

unofficial client library
Haskell

unofficial client library
Java
JavaScript

unofficial client library
Lisp

unofficial client library
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

unofficial client library
Smalltalk

unofficial client library

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

JavaScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

user defined functions

Erlang

user defined functions

yes

Triggers

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

pre-commit hooks and post-commit hooks

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

horizontal partitioning

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

yes

Graph Partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

yes

Journaling Streams

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

links between data sets can be stored

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

ACID

MVCC

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

in-memory journaling

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes, using Riak Security

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

Role-based access control

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