DBMS > 4D vs. Firebird vs. Google BigQuery vs. Milvus

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Firebird vs. Google BigQuery vs. Milvus

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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

A DBMS designed for efficient storage of vector data and vector similarity searches

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

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

Score	2.47
Rank	#110	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	20.50
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	58.10
Rank	#19	Overall
	#13	Relational DBMS

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#4	Vector DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

www.firebirdsql.org

cloud.google.com/bigquery

milvus.io

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

Developer

4D, Inc

Firebird Foundation

Google

Initial release

1984

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2010

2019

Current release

v20, April 2023

5.0.0, January 2024

2.4.4, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

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.

Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Implementation language

C and C++

C++, Go

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

hosted

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Data scheme

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

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

close to SQL 92

yes

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

RESTful HTTP API

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

C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

PSQL

user defined functions

in JavaScript

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable 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

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

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

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

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)

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Milvus is an open-source and cloud-native vector database built for production-ready...
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Competitive advantages

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
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Typical application scenarios

RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
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Key customers

Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
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Market metrics

As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
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Licensing and pricing models

Milvus was released under the open-source Apache License 2.0 in October 2019. Fully-managed...
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