DBMS > Google Cloud Firestore vs. H2GIS vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Firestore vs. H2GIS vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Sphinx

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.

Spatial extension of H2

Search-as-a-service for web and mobile app development

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Primary database model

Document store

Spatial DBMS

Search engine

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Search engine

Secondary database models

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	7.36
Rank	#53	Overall
	#9	Document stores

Score	0.08
Rank	#368	Overall
	#7	Spatial DBMS

Score	5.52
Rank	#59	Overall
	#6	Search engines

Score	27.71
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

firebase.google.com/products/firestore

www.h2gis.org

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/search

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/firestore

www.h2gis.org/docs/home

learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Google

CNRS

Microsoft

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2017

2013

2015

2014

2001

Current release

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

LGPL 3.0

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

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

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON 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.

Secondary indexes

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

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

RESTful HTTP API

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

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

Java

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes, Firebase Rules & Cloud Functions

yes

based on H2

JavaScript

Triggers

yes, with Cloud Functions

yes

JavaScript

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

yes

based on H2

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Using Cloud Dataflow

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

ACID

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

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.

yes

based on H2

yes

using Azure authentication

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

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