DBMS > Adabas vs. Cassandra vs. Firebird vs. IRONdb vs. Microsoft Access

System Properties Comparison Adabas vs. Cassandra vs. Firebird vs. IRONdb vs. Microsoft Access

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

IRONdb seems to be discontinued. Therefore it is excluded from the DB-Engines Ranking.

Description

OLTP - DBMS for mainframes and Linux/Unix/Windows environments

used typically together with the Natural programming platform

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

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

A distributed Time Series DBMS with a focus on scalability, fault tolerance and operational simplicity

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

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

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

Score	3.17
Rank	#94	Overall
	#1	Multivalue DBMS

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Website

www.softwareag.com/en_corporate/platform/adabas-natural.html

cassandra.apache.org

www.firebirdsql.org

www.circonus.com/solutions/time-series-database/

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

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

docs.circonus.com/irondb/category/getting-started

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

Developer

Software AG

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Firebird Foundation

Circonus LLC.

Microsoft

Initial release

1971

2008

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2017

1992

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

5.0.0, January 2024

V0.10.20, January 2018

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Astra DB: Multi-cloud DBaaS built on Apache Cassandra.

Implementation language

Java

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

BS2000
Linux
Unix
Windows
z/OS
z/VSE

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

text, numeric, histograms

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

with add-on product Adabas SQL Gateway

SQL-like SELECT, DML and DDL statements (CQL)

yes

SQL-like query language (Circonus Analytics Query Language: CAQL)

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

APIs and other access methods

HTTP API

with add-on software Adabas SOA Gateway
SOAP-based API

with add-on software Adabas SOA Gateway

Proprietary protocol

CQL (Cassandra Query Language, an SQL-like language)
Thrift

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

HTTP API

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

Supported programming languages

Natural

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lisp
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Rust
Scala

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

in Natural

PSQL

yes, in Lua

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

yes, with additonal products like Adabas Cluster Services, Adabas Parallel Services, Adabas Vista

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

none

Automatic, metric affinity per node

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes, with add-on product Event Replicator

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Source-replica replication

configurable replication factor, datacenter aware

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Immediate consistency per node, eventual consistency across nodes

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

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

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.

User concepts

Access control

only with OS-specific tools (e.g. IBM RACF, CA Top Secret)

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
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Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
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Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
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Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
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Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
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Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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