DBMS > Apache Derby vs. Firebird vs. SQLite

System Properties Comparison Apache Derby vs. Firebird vs. SQLite

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Full-featured RDBMS with a small footprint, either embedded into a Java application or used as a database server.

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

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

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

Score	3.04
Rank	#85	Overall
	#46	Relational DBMS

Score	16.66
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Score	117.77
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Website

db.apache.org/derby

www.firebirdsql.org

www.sqlite.org

Technical documentation

db.apache.org/derby/manuals/index.html

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Firebird Foundation

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Initial release

1997

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2000

Current release

10.17.1.0, November 2023

5.0.1, August 2024

3.46.1 (13 August 2024), August 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

Public Domain

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.

Implementation language

Java

C and C++

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

server-less

Data scheme

yes

dynamic column types

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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

SQL-92 is not fully supported

APIs and other access methods

JDBC

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

Supported programming languages

Java

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Java Stored Procedures

PSQL

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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

via file-system locks

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

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More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

Big gains for Relational Database Management Systems in DB-Engines Ranking
2 February 2016, Matthias Gelbmann

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