DBMS > Alibaba Cloud PolarDB vs. Firebird vs. SAP IQ vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Alibaba Cloud PolarDB vs. Firebird vs. SAP IQ vs. Snowflake

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A cloud-native relational database compatible with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle. Designed for business critical applications.

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

Columnar RDBMS optimized for Big Data analytics

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

column-oriented

Relational DBMS

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

Score	0.82
Rank	#205	Overall
	#97	Relational DBMS

Score	19.46
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	2.56
Rank	#106	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	133.72
Rank	#7	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

www.alibabacloud.com/product/polardb

www.firebirdsql.org

www.sap.com/products/technology-platform/sybase-iq-big-data-management.html

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/polardb/product-overview

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

help.sap.com/docs/SAP_IQ

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Alibaba

Firebird Foundation

SAP, formerly Sybase

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

1994

2014

Current release

5.0.1, August 2024

16.1 SPS04, April 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

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

Implementation language

C and C++

Server operating systems

hosted

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

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

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Java
Python

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C
C#
C++
Java
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

PSQL

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

shared disk or shared nothing architectures with SAP IQ Multiplexer

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Source-replica replication

SAP/Sybase Replication Server

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Hadoop integration

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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Typical application scenarios

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Licensing and pricing models

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