DBMS > Firebase Realtime Database vs. Redis vs. SAP SQL Anywhere vs. Sphinx vs. TerarkDB

System Properties Comparison Firebase Realtime Database vs. Redis vs. SAP SQL Anywhere vs. Sphinx vs. TerarkDB

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.

Popular in-memory data platform used as a cache, message broker, and database that can be deployed on-premises, across clouds, and hybrid environments

Redis focuses on performance so most of its design decisions prioritize high performance and very low latencies.

RDBMS database and synchronization technologies for server, desktop, remote office, and mobile environments

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

A key-value store forked from RocksDB with advanced compression algorithms. It can be used standalone or as a storage engine for MySQL and MongoDB

Primary database model

Document store

Key-value store

Multiple data types and a rich set of operations, as well as configurable data expiration, eviction and persistence

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Key-value store

Secondary database models

Document store

with RedisJSON
Graph DBMS

with RedisGraph
Spatial DBMS
Search engine

with RediSearch
Time Series DBMS

with RedisTimeSeries
Vector DBMS

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

Score	15.00
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	156.44
Rank	#6	Overall
	#1	Key-value stores

Score	4.57
Rank	#78	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	6.03
Rank	#60	Overall
	#6	Search engines

Score	0.04
Rank	#377	Overall
	#58	Key-value stores

Website

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

redis.com
redis.io

www.sap.com/products/technology-platform/sql-anywhere.html

sphinxsearch.com

github.com/bytedance/terarkdb

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/database

docs.redis.com/latest/index.html
redis.io/docs

help.sap.com/docs/SAP_SQL_Anywhere

sphinxsearch.com/docs

bytedance.larkoffice.com/docs/doccnZmYFqHBm06BbvYgjsHHcKc

Developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Redis project core team, inspired by Salvatore Sanfilippo

Development sponsored by Redis Inc.

SAP

formerly Sybase

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

ByteDance, originally Terark

Initial release

2012

2009

1992

2001

2016

Current release

7.2.4, January 2024

17, July 2015

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

source-available extensions (modules), commercial licenses for Redis Enterprise

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

commercial

restricted open source version available

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.

Aiven for Redis: Fully managed in-memory key-value store for all your caching and speedy lookup needs.

Implementation language

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

ported and maintained by Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

partial

Supported data types are strings, hashes, lists, sets and sorted sets, bit arrays, hyperloglogs and geospatial indexes

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

with RediSearch module

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

with RediSQL module

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

proprietary protocol

RESP - REdis Serialization Protocol

ADO.NET
HTTP API
JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

C++ API
Java API

Supported programming languages

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

C
C#
C++
Clojure
Crystal
D
Dart
Elixir
Erlang
Fancy
Go
Haskell
Haxe
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Pascal
Perl
PHP
Prolog
Pure Data
Python
R
Rebol
Ruby
Rust
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Swift
Tcl
Visual Basic

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

C++
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

Lua; Redis Functions coming in Redis 7 (slides and Github)

yes, in C/C++, Java, .Net or Perl

Triggers

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

publish/subscribe channels provide some trigger functionality; RedisGears

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Automatic hash-based sharding with support for hash-tags for manual sharding

none

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

with Redis Enterprise Pack
Source-replica replication

Chained replication is supported

Source-replica replication

Database mirroring

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

through RedisGears

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Eventual Consistency
Causal consistency can be enabled in Active-Active databases
Strong consistency with Redis Raft
Strong eventual consistency with Active-Active

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

Atomic execution of command blocks and scripts and optimistic locking

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Data access is serialized by the server

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Configurable mechanisms for persistency via snapshots and/or operations logs

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

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

Access Control Lists (ACLs): redis.io/docs/management/security/acl
LDAP and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) for Redis Enterprise
Mutual TLS authentication: redis.io/docs/management/security/encryption
Password-based authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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