DBMS > Apache Drill vs. EXASOL vs. Firebird vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. RDF4J

System Properties Comparison Apache Drill vs. EXASOL vs. Firebird vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. RDF4J

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Schema-free SQL Query Engine for Hadoop, NoSQL and Cloud Storage

High-performance, in-memory, MPP database specifically designed for in-memory analytics.

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

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

RDF4J is a Java framework for processing RDF data, supporting both memory-based and a disk-based storage.

Primary database model

Document store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

RDF store

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	1.95
Rank	#127	Overall
	#23	Document stores
	#60	Relational DBMS

Score	1.99
Rank	#124	Overall
	#58	Relational DBMS

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	0.69
Rank	#230	Overall
	#9	RDF stores

Website

drill.apache.org

www.exasol.com

www.firebirdsql.org

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

rdf4j.org

Technical documentation

drill.apache.org/docs

www.exasol.com/resources

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

rdf4j.org/documentation

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Exasol

Firebird Foundation

Microsoft

Since 2016 officially forked into an Eclipse project, former developer was Aduna Software.

Initial release

2012

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

1989

2004

Current release

1.20.3, January 2023

5.0.0, January 2024

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

commercial

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Eclipse Distribution License (EDL), v1.0.

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C and C++

C++

Java

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux
Windows

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

RDF Schemas

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

SQL SELECT statement is SQL:2003 compliant

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

.Net
JDBC
ODBC
WebSocket

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

Java API
RIO

RDF Input/Output
Sail API
SeRQL

Sesame RDF Query Language
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL

Supported programming languages

C++

Java
Lua
Python
R

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

Java
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

PSQL

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

yes

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Hadoop integration

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

none

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Isolation support depends on the API used

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

Depending on the underlying data source

yes

in-memory storage is supported as well

In-memory capabilities

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

Depending on the underlying data source

yes

User concepts

Access control

Depending on the underlying data source

Access rights for users, groups and roles according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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