DBMS > 4D vs. Firebird vs. Interbase vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Firebird vs. Interbase vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

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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

Light-weight proven RDBMS

originally from Borland

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Secondary database models

Spatial 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	4.61
Rank	#72	Overall
	#39	Relational DBMS

Score	29.04
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Website

www.4d.com

www.firebirdsql.org

www.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

docs.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

Developer

4D, Inc

Firebird Foundation

Embarcadero

Microsoft

Initial release

1984

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

1984

2014

Current release

v20, April 2023

5.0.0, January 2024

InterBase 2020, December 2019

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

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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

Android
iOS
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

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.

yes

export as XML data possible

Secondary indexes

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

yes

SQL-like query language

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

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

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

PSQL

yes

Interbase procedure and trigger language

JavaScript

Triggers

yes

JavaScript

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

Source-replica replication

Interbase Change Views

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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

ACID

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

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

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

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