DBMS > Google Cloud Bigtable vs. Google Cloud Datastore vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. RethinkDB

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Bigtable vs. Google Cloud Datastore vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. RethinkDB

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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.

DBMS for the Web with a mechanism to push updated query results to applications in realtime.

Primary database model

Key-value store
Wide column store

Document store

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	3.26
Rank	#92	Overall
	#13	Key-value stores
	#8	Wide column stores

Score	4.47
Rank	#76	Overall
	#12	Document stores

Score	7.85
Rank	#51	Overall
	#8	Document stores

Score	2.74
Rank	#105	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Website

cloud.google.com/bigtable

cloud.google.com/datastore

firebase.google.com/products/firestore

rethinkdb.com

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs

cloud.google.com/datastore/docs

firebase.google.com/docs/firestore

rethinkdb.com/docs

Developer

Google

The Linux Foundation

since July 2017

Initial release

2015

2008

2017

2009

Current release

2.4.1, August 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2

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++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes, details here

yes

string, binary, float, bool, date, geometry

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

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language (GQL)

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

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

community-supported driver
C#

community-supported driver
C++

community-supported driver
Clojure

community-supported driver
Dart

community-supported driver
Erlang

community-supported driver
Go

community-supported driver
Haskell

community-supported driver
Java

official driver
JavaScript (Node.js)

official driver
Lisp

community-supported driver
Lua

community-supported driver
Objective-C

community-supported driver
Perl

community-supported driver
PHP

community-supported driver
Python

official driver
Ruby

official driver
Scala

community-supported driver

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

using Google App Engine

yes, Firebase Rules & Cloud Functions

Triggers

Callbacks using the Google Apps Engine

yes, with Cloud Functions

Client-side triggers through changefeeds

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

range based

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

Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Using Cloud Dataflow

yes

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

via ReferenceProperties or Ancestor paths

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

Atomic single-document operations

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

MVCC based

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.

yes

users and table-level permissions

More information provided by the system vendor

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Related products and services

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More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

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