DBMS > Firebase Realtime Database vs. RethinkDB vs. Snowflake vs. TerminusDB vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison Firebase Realtime Database vs. RethinkDB vs. Snowflake vs. TerminusDB 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.

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

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

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

Primary database model

Secondary database models

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	2.74
Rank	#105	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	0.17
Rank	#325	Overall
	#29	Graph DBMS

Score	1.73
Rank	#143	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Website

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

rethinkdb.com

www.snowflake.com

terminusdb.com

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/database

rethinkdb.com/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

terminusdb.github.io/terminusdb/#

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

The Linux Foundation

since July 2017

Snowflake Computing Inc.

DataChemist Ltd.

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2012

2009

2014

2018

2019

Current release

2.4.1, August 2020

11.0.0, January 2023

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2

commercial

Open Source

GPL V3

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.

Implementation language

C++

Prolog, Rust

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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

yes

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, binary, float, bool, date, geometry

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

SQL-like query language (WOQL)

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

OWL
RESTful HTTP API
WOQL (Web Object Query Language)

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

JavaScript
Python

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

user defined functions

yes

Triggers

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

Client-side triggers through changefeeds

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

range based

yes

Graph Partitioning

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

yes

Journaling Streams

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

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 journaling

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

yes

users and table-level permissions

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

Role-based access control

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
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Competitive advantages

Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
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Typical application scenarios

As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
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Key customers

All companies that have data.
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Market metrics

As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
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Licensing and pricing models

Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
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