DBMS > Firebird vs. Google Cloud Bigtable vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Lovefield vs. Redis

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. Google Cloud Bigtable vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Lovefield vs. Redis

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Firebird is an open source RDBMS forked from Borland's InterBase

Google's NoSQL Big Data database service. It's the same database that powers many core Google services, including Search, Analytics, Maps, and Gmail.

A high performance, column-oriented RDBMS, specifically developed to harness the massive parallelism of modern CPU and GPU hardware

Embeddable relational database for web apps written in pure JavaScript

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.

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

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

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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	19.46
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	2.97
Rank	#92	Overall
	#15	Key-value stores
	#8	Wide column stores

Score	1.41
Rank	#153	Overall
	#71	Relational DBMS

Score	0.22
Rank	#306	Overall
	#138	Relational DBMS

Score	149.43
Rank	#6	Overall
	#1	Key-value stores

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

cloud.google.com/bigtable

github.com/heavyai/heavydb
www.heavy.ai

google.github.io/lovefield

redis.com
redis.io

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs

docs.heavy.ai

github.com/google/lovefield/blob/master/docs/spec_index.md

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

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Google

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

Google

Redis project core team, inspired by Salvatore Sanfilippo

Development sponsored by Redis Inc.

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2015

2016

2014

2009

Current release

5.0.1, August 2024

5.10, January 2022

2.1.12, February 2017

7.2.5, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

source-available extensions (modules), commercial licenses for Redis 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 and C++

C++ and CUDA

JavaScript

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

hosted

Linux

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

tested with Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

ported and maintained by Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.

Data scheme

yes

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

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

with RediSearch module

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language

via JavaScript builder pattern

with RediSQL module

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
HappyBase (Python library)
HBase compatible API (Java)

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

proprietary protocol

RESP - REdis Serialization Protocol

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

JavaScript

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

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

Triggers

yes

Using read-only observers

publish/subscribe channels provide some trigger functionality; RedisGears

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Round robin

none

Sharding

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

Internal replication in Colossus, and regional replication between two clusters in different zones

Multi-source replication

none

Multi-source replication

with Redis Enterprise Pack
Source-replica replication

Chained replication is supported

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

through RedisGears

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate consistency (for a single cluster), Eventual consistency (for two or more replicated clusters)

Immediate Consistency

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Atomic single-row operations

ACID

Atomic execution of command blocks and scripts and optimistic locking

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Features a multi-generational MVCC architecture, readers do not block writers

yes

Data access is serialized by the server

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, by using IndexedDB or the cloud service Firebase Realtime Database

yes

Configurable mechanisms for persistency via snapshots and/or operations logs

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

using MemoryDB

yes

User concepts

Access control

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

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