DBMS > Firebird vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Cloud Firestore is an auto-scaling document database for storing, syncing, and querying data for mobile and web apps. It offers seamless integration with other Firebase and Google Cloud Platform products.

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	7.85
Rank	#51	Overall
	#8	Document stores

Score	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	29.04
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

firebase.google.com/products/firestore

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

firebase.google.com/docs/firestore

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Google

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Microsoft

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2017

2010

2014

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

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 and C++

Erlang

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

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

All properties auto-indexed by default

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

Android
gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Go
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
Python

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

yes, Firebase Rules & Cloud Functions

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

JavaScript

Triggers

yes

yes, with Cloud Functions

yes

JavaScript

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Using Cloud Dataflow

yes

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

yes

atomic operations within a document possible

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

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

yes

Optimistic locking

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management. Security Rules for 3rd party authentication using Firebase Auth.

Access rights for users can be defined per database

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

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