DBMS > Google Cloud Bigtable vs. Google Cloud Datastore vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. OpenSearch vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Bigtable vs. Google Cloud Datastore vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. OpenSearch vs. TimescaleDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Automatically scaling NoSQL Database as a Service (DBaaS) on the Google Cloud Platform

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.

A distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine forked from Elasticsearch and based on Apache Lucene

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Key-value store
Wide column store

Document store

Search engine

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	3.15
Rank	#95	Overall
	#14	Key-value stores
	#8	Wide column stores

Score	4.36
Rank	#72	Overall
	#12	Document stores

Score	7.36
Rank	#53	Overall
	#9	Document stores

Score	16.03
Rank	#37	Overall
	#4	Search engines

Score	4.46
Rank	#71	Overall
	#5	Time Series DBMS

Website

cloud.google.com/bigtable

cloud.google.com/datastore

firebase.google.com/products/firestore

github.com/opensearch-project
opensearch.org

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs

cloud.google.com/datastore/docs

firebase.google.com/docs/firestore

opensearch.org/docs/latest

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Google

Amazon Web Services

Timescale

Initial release

2015

2008

2017

2021

2017

Current release

2.5.0, January 2023

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

Java

Server operating systems

hosted

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes, details here

yes

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data 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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language (GQL)

SQL-like query language

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

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

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

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

.Net
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

Elasticsearch client

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

using Google App Engine

yes, Firebase Rules & Cloud Functions

yes

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

Callbacks using the Google Apps Engine

yes, with Cloud Functions

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

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

Multi-source replication using Paxos

Multi-source replication

yes

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Using Cloud Dataflow

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 or Eventual Consistency depending on type of query and configuration

Strong Consistency is default for entity lookups and queries within an Entity Group (but can instead be made eventually consistent). Other queries are always eventual consistent.

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

via ReferenceProperties or Ancestor paths

yes

Transaction concepts

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

Atomic single-row operations

ACID

Serializable Isolation within Transactions, Read Committed outside of Transactions

yes

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

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

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

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

OpenSearch is a highly scalable and extensible open-source software suite for search,...
» more

Competitive advantages

Distributed as fully open source under Apache License, Version 2.0 (ALv2), OpenSearch...
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Typical application scenarios

The OpenSearch platform is used across a broad range of search , analytics, and observability...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

The OpenSearch Project offers open source software licensed under Apache License...
» more

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