DBMS > Google Cloud Firestore vs. Informix vs. mSQL vs. Sphinx vs. SQLite

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Firestore vs. Informix vs. mSQL vs. Sphinx vs. SQLite

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 secure embeddable database from IBM, positioned besides IBM Db2 as a relatively low-cost product optimized for OLTP and Internet of Things data

mSQL (Mini SQL) is a simple and lightweight RDBMS

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

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

Since Version 12.10 support for JSON/BSON datatypes compatible with MongoDB

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

with Informix TimeSeries Extension

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

Score	7.85
Rank	#51	Overall
	#8	Document stores

Score	17.87
Rank	#35	Overall
	#22	Relational DBMS

Score	1.27
Rank	#167	Overall
	#77	Relational DBMS

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	114.32
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Website

firebase.google.com/products/firestore

www.ibm.com/products/informix

hughestech.com.au/products/msql

sphinxsearch.com

www.sqlite.org

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/firestore

informix.hcldoc.com
www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSGU8G/welcomeIfxServers.html

sphinxsearch.com/docs

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

Developer

Google

IBM, HCL Technologies

Effective May 1st, 2017, HCL took on development, technical support, and product management teams, and works jointly with IBM on product strategy, marketing, and sales.

Hughes Technologies

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Initial release

2017

1984

1994

2001

2000

Current release

14.10.FC5, November 2020

4.4, October 2021

3.5.1, February 2023

3.45.3 (15 April 2024), April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free developer edition available

commercial

free licenses can be provided

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

Public Domain

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, C++ and Java

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris SPARC/x86
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

server-less

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

dynamic column types

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Since Version 12.10 support for JSON/BSON datatypes

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

A subset of ANSI SQL is implemented

no subqueries, aggregate functions, views, foreign keys, triggers

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

APIs and other access methods

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

JDBC
JSON API

MongoDB compatible
MQTT (Message Queue Telemetry Transport)
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

Supported programming languages

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

.Net
C
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

C
C++
Delphi
Java
Perl
PHP
Tcl

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes, Firebase Rules & Cloud Functions

yes

Triggers

yes, with Cloud Functions

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

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

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Using Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

none

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

via file-system locks

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

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

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.

Users with fine-grained authentication, authorization, and auditing controls

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