DBMS > Firebase Realtime Database vs. RethinkDB vs. Riak KV vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Firebase Realtime Database vs. RethinkDB vs. Riak KV vs. Snowflake

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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.

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

Distributed, fault tolerant key-value store

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

Primary database model

Document store

Key-value store

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

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	15.00
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	2.84
Rank	#106	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Score	4.44
Rank	#80	Overall
	#9	Key-value stores

Score	123.20
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

rethinkdb.com

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/database

rethinkdb.com/docs

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

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

The Linux Foundation

since July 2017

OpenSource, formerly Basho Technologies

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2012

2009

2014

Current release

2.4.1, August 2020

3.2.0, December 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

Apache version 2, commercial enterprise edition

commercial

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++

Erlang

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
OS X

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, binary, float, bool, date, geometry

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

restricted

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

APIs and other access methods

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

HTTP API
Native Erlang Interface

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

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

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

Erlang

user defined functions

Triggers

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

Client-side triggers through changefeeds

yes

pre-commit hooks and post-commit hooks

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

range based

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

selectable replication factor

yes

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

links between data sets can be stored

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

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.

User concepts

Access control

yes, based on authentication and database rules

yes

users and table-level permissions

yes, using Riak Security

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

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