DBMS > etcd vs. Firebird vs. Memcached vs. Snowflake vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison etcd vs. Firebird vs. Memcached vs. Snowflake vs. Weaviate

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A distributed reliable key-value store

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

In-memory key-value store, originally intended for caching

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

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

Primary database model

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

Score	7.03
Rank	#54	Overall
	#5	Key-value stores

Score	20.50
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	18.08
Rank	#32	Overall
	#4	Key-value stores

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	1.52
Rank	#153	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Website

etcd.io
github.com/etcd-io/etcd

www.firebirdsql.org

www.memcached.org

www.snowflake.com

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

etcd.io/docs
github.com/etcd-io/etcd/tree/master/Documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

github.com/memcached/memcached/wiki

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Danga Interactive

originally developed by Brad Fitzpatrick for LiveJournal

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2003

2014

2019

Current release

3.4, August 2019

5.0.0, January 2024

1.6.27, May 2024

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

BSD license

commercial

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 and C++

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
Windows

experimental

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

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

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

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

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

gRPC
JSON over HTTP

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

Proprietary protocol

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Rust
Scala
Tcl

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
ColdFusion
Erlang
Java
Lisp
Lua
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

user defined functions

Triggers

yes, watching key changes

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

yes

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Using Raft consensus algorithm to ensure data replication with strong consistency among multiple replicas.

Source-replica replication

none

Repcached, a Memcached patch, provides this functionallity

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

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

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.

yes

User concepts

Access control

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

yes

using SASL (Simple Authentication and Security Layer) protocol

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

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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