DBMS > Apache Impala vs. Firebird vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Postgres-XL vs. RocksDB

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. Firebird vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Postgres-XL vs. RocksDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

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

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Based on PostgreSQL enhanced with MPP and write-scale-out cluster features

Embeddable persistent key-value store optimized for fast storage (flash and RAM)

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	12.45
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	20.50
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	2.75
Rank	#104	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Score	0.53
Rank	#254	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Score	3.41
Rank	#86	Overall
	#11	Key-value stores

Website

impala.apache.org

www.firebirdsql.org

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

www.postgres-xl.org

rocksdb.org

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Firebird Foundation

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Facebook, Inc.

Initial release

2013

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2010

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

2013

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

5.0.0, January 2024

10 R1, October 2018

9.2.1, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Open Source

Mozilla public license

Open Source

BSD

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++

C and C++

Erlang

C++

Server operating systems

Linux

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

hosted

Linux
macOS

Linux

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free

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

XML type, but no XML query functionality

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

C++ API
Java API

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Erlang
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

C
C++
Go
Java
Perl
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

PSQL

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

query execution via MapReduce

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

MVCC

yes

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Features a multi-generational MVCC architecture, readers do not block writers

yes

Optimistic locking

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

Access rights for users, groups and roles

based on Apache Sentry and Kerberos

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

Access rights for users can be defined per database

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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