DBMS > 4D vs. Firebird vs. Google BigQuery vs. Interbase vs. Microsoft Access

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Firebird vs. Google BigQuery vs. Interbase vs. Microsoft Access

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

Firebird is an open source RDBMS forked from Borland's InterBase

Large scale data warehouse service with append-only tables

Light-weight proven RDBMS

originally from Borland

Microsoft Access combines a backend RDBMS (JET / ACE Engine) with a GUI frontend for data manipulation and queries.

The Access frontend is often used for accessing other datasources (DBMS, Excel, etc.)

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

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Score	2.58
Rank	#108	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	60.38
Rank	#19	Overall
	#13	Relational DBMS

Score	4.61
Rank	#72	Overall
	#39	Relational DBMS

Score	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

www.firebirdsql.org

cloud.google.com/bigquery

www.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/access

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs

docs.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

Developer

4D, Inc

Firebird Foundation

Google

Embarcadero

Microsoft

Initial release

1984

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2010

1984

1992

Current release

v20, April 2023

5.0.0, January 2024

InterBase 2020, December 2019

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

hosted

Android
iOS
Linux
OS X
Windows

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

Data scheme

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.

yes

export as XML data possible

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java
Object Pascal
PHP
Ruby

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java (JDBC-ODBC)
VBA
Visual Basic.NET

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

PSQL

user defined functions

in JavaScript

yes

Interbase procedure and trigger language

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

Source-replica replication

Interbase Change Views

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Since BigQuery is designed for querying data

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Features a multi-generational MVCC architecture, readers do not block writers

yes

Multiversion concurreny control

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

but no files for transaction logging

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

User concepts

Access control

Users and groups

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

Access privileges (owner, writer, reader) on dataset, table or view level

Google Cloud Identity & Access Management (IAM)

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

a simple user-level security was built in till version Access 2003

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