DBMS > Firebird vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Netezza vs. Redis vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Netezza vs. Redis vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

A horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service. It is the externalization of the core Google database that runs the biggest aspects of Google, like Ads and Google Play.

Data warehouse and analytics appliance part of IBM PureSystems

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.

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

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

Relational DBMS

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	21.06
Rank	#31	Overall
	#19	Relational DBMS

Score	2.89
Rank	#105	Overall
	#53	Relational DBMS

Score	10.18
Rank	#46	Overall
	#29	Relational DBMS

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

Score	123.20
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.ibm.com/products/netezza

redis.com
redis.io

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

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

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Google

IBM

Redis project core team, inspired by Salvatore Sanfilippo

Development sponsored by Redis Inc.

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2017

2000

2009

2014

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

7.2.4, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Open Source

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

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.

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

Implementation language

C and C++

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

hosted

Linux

included in appliance

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

ported and maintained by Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

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

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

with RediSQL module

yes

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB

proprietary protocol

RESP - REdis Serialization Protocol

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C
C++
Fortran
Java
Lua
Perl
Python
R

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

yes

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

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

publish/subscribe channels provide some trigger functionality; RedisGears

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

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

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication

with Redis Enterprise Pack
Source-replica replication

Chained replication is supported

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

yes

through RedisGears

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

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

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

Atomic execution of command blocks and scripts and optimistic locking

ACID

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

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Configurable mechanisms for persistency via snapshots and/or operations logs

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

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

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

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