DBMS > 4D vs. Firebird vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. TimesTen

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Firebird vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. TimesTen

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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

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.

In-Memory RDBMS compatible to Oracle

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

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

Score	2.58
Rank	#108	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	1.31
Rank	#163	Overall
	#74	Relational DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

www.firebirdsql.org

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/timesten.html

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

docs.oracle.com/database/timesten-18.1

Developer

4D, Inc

Firebird Foundation

Google

Oracle, TimesTen Performance Software, HP

originally founded in HP Labs it was acquired by Oracle in 2005

Initial release

1984

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2017

1998

Current release

v20, April 2023

5.0.0, January 2024

11 Release 2 (11.2.2.8.0)

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

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 and C++

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

hosted

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

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

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

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

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C
C++
Java
PL/SQL

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

PSQL

PL/SQL

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

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

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

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

by means of logfiles and checkpoints

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 rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

MySQL, PostgreSQL and Redis are the winners of the March ranking
2 March 2016, Paul Andlinger

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