DBMS > Adabas vs. Firebird vs. Geode vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Adabas vs. Firebird vs. Geode vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

used typically together with the Natural programming platform

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

Geode is a distributed data container, pooling memory, CPU, network resources, and optionally local disk across multiple processes

Search-as-a-service for web and mobile app development

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

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

Score	2.79
Rank	#102	Overall
	#2	Multivalue DBMS

Score	20.50
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	1.86
Rank	#134	Overall
	#24	Key-value stores

Score	5.52
Rank	#59	Overall
	#6	Search engines

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

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

www.firebirdsql.org

geode.apache.org

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/search

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

geode.apache.org/docs

learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Software AG

Firebird Foundation

Originally developed by Gemstone. They outsourced the project to Apache in 2015 but still deliver a commercial version as Gemfire.

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

1971

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2002

2015

2014

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

1.1, February 2017

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

Apache Version 2; commercial licenses available as Gemfire

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++

Java

Server operating systems

BS2000
Linux
Unix
Windows
z/OS
z/VSE

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

the JDK (8 or later) is also required

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

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

with add-on product Adabas SQL Gateway

yes

SQL-like query language (OQL)

yes

APIs and other access methods

HTTP API

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

with add-on software Adabas SOA Gateway

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

Java Client API
Memcached protocol
RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Natural

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
All JVM based languages
C++
Groovy
Java
Scala

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

in Natural

PSQL

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

Cache Event Listeners

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

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

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes, with add-on product Event Replicator

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

yes, on a single node

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

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

User concepts

Access control

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

Access rights per client and object definable

yes

using Azure authentication

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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