DBMS > Google Cloud Firestore vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. HBase vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Firestore vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. HBase vs. Snowflake

Please select another system to include it in the comparison.

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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 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.

Wide-column store based on Apache Hadoop and on concepts of BigTable

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

Primary database model

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

Score	7.85
Rank	#51	Overall
	#8	Document stores

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	30.50
Rank	#26	Overall
	#2	Wide column stores

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

firebase.google.com/products/firestore

cloud.google.com/spanner

hbase.apache.org

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/firestore

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

hbase.apache.org/book.html

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Google

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Powerset

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2017

2008

2014

Current release

2.3.4, January 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

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

Java

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
Unix
Windows

using Cygwin

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free, schema definition possible

yes

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

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

options to bring your own types, AVRO

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

APIs and other access methods

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

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

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

Java API
RESTful HTTP API
Thrift

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

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

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C
C#
C++
Groovy
Java
PHP
Python
Scala

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes, Firebase Rules & Cloud Functions

yes

Coprocessors in Java

user defined functions

Triggers

yes, with Cloud Functions

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Using Cloud Dataflow

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency

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

yes

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

Single row ACID (across millions of columns)

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.

yes

User concepts

Access control

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

Access Control Lists (ACL) for RBAC, integration with Apache Ranger for RBAC & ABAC

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

More information provided by the system vendor

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.