DBMS > Google Cloud Firestore vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Lovefield

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Firestore vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Lovefield

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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.

Embeddable relational database for web apps written in pure JavaScript

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

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

Score	8.96
Rank	#48	Overall
	#8	Document stores

Score	2.89
Rank	#105	Overall
	#53	Relational DBMS

Score	0.32
Rank	#290	Overall
	#132	Relational DBMS

Website

firebase.google.com/products/firestore

cloud.google.com/spanner

google.github.io/lovefield

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/firestore

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

github.com/google/lovefield/blob/master/docs/spec_index.md

Developer

Google

Initial release

2017

2014

Current release

2.1.12, February 2017

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

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

JavaScript

Server operating systems

hosted

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

tested with Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

SQL-like query language

via JavaScript builder pattern

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

Supported programming languages

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

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

JavaScript

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes, Firebase Rules & Cloud Functions

Triggers

yes, with Cloud Functions

Using read-only observers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Using Cloud Dataflow

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, by using IndexedDB or the cloud service Firebase Realtime Database

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

using MemoryDB

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)

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More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

Cloud-based DBMS's popularity grows at high rates
12 December 2019, Paul Andlinger

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Recent citations in the news

Realtime vs Cloud Firestore: Which Firebase Database to go?
8 March 2024, Appinventiv

Google's AI-First Strategy Brings Vector Support To Cloud Databases
1 March 2024, Forbes

Google’s Firebase gets AI extensions, opens up its marketplace
10 May 2023, TechCrunch

Google's Cloud Firestore is now generally available
31 January 2019, ZDNet

Firestore and Python | NoSQL on Google Cloud
7 August 2020, Towards Data Science

provided by Google News

Google Improves Cloud Spanner: More Compute and Storage without Price Increase
14 October 2023, InfoQ.com

Google turns up the heat on AWS, claims Cloud Spanner is half the cost of DynamoDB
11 October 2023, TechCrunch

Google makes its Cloud Spanner database service faster and more cost-efficient
11 October 2023, SiliconANGLE News

Google Spanner: When Do You Need to Move to It?
11 September 2023, hackernoon.com

Google Cloud Spanner competes directly with Amazon DynamoDB
12 October 2023, Techzine Europe

provided by Google News

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