DBMS > BaseX vs. Firebird vs. IBM Cloudant vs. PostgreSQL vs. Riak KV

System Properties Comparison BaseX vs. Firebird vs. IBM Cloudant vs. PostgreSQL vs. Riak KV

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Light-weight Native XML DBMS with support for XQuery 3.0 and interactive GUI.

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

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Widely used open source RDBMS

Developed as objectoriented DBMS (Postgres), gradually enhanced with 'standards' like SQL

Distributed, fault tolerant key-value store

Primary database model

with object oriented extensions, e.g.: user defined types/functions and inheritance. Handling of key/value pairs with hstore module.

Key-value store

with links between data sets and object tags for the creation of secondary indexes

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS

with Apache Age
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

with pgvector extension

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

Score	1.73
Rank	#142	Overall
	#4	Native XML DBMS

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	645.54
Rank	#4	Overall
	#4	Relational DBMS

Score	4.10
Rank	#82	Overall
	#9	Key-value stores

Website

basex.org

www.firebirdsql.org

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

www.postgresql.org

Technical documentation

docs.basex.org

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

www.postgresql.org/docs

www.tiot.jp/riak-docs/riak/kv/latest

Developer

BaseX GmbH

Firebird Foundation

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

PostgreSQL Global Development Group

www.postgresql.org/developer

OpenSource, formerly Basho Technologies

Initial release

2007

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2010

1989

1989: Postgres, 1996: PostgreSQL

2009

Current release

10.7, August 2023

5.0.0, January 2024

16.3, May 2024

3.2.0, December 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

BSD license

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Open Source

BSD

Open Source

Apache version 2, commercial enterprise edition

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

Java

C and C++

Erlang

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

hosted

FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
NetBSD
OpenBSD
OS X
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux
OS X

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

XQuery supports types

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

specific XML-type available, but no XML query functionality.

Secondary indexes

yes

restricted

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

standard with numerous extensions

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP API
RESTXQ
WebDAV
XML:DB
XQJ

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

HTTP API
Native Erlang Interface

Supported programming languages

Actionscript
C
C#
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lisp
Perl
PHP
Python
Qt
Rebol
Ruby
Scala
Visual Basic

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

unofficial client library
C#
C++

unofficial client library
Clojure

unofficial client library
Dart

unofficial client library
Erlang
Go

unofficial client library
Groovy

unofficial client library
Haskell

unofficial client library
Java
JavaScript

unofficial client library
Lisp

unofficial client library
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

unofficial client library
Smalltalk

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

PSQL

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

user defined functions

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

Erlang

Triggers

yes

via events

yes

pre-commit hooks and post-commit hooks

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

partitioning by range, list and (since PostgreSQL 11) by hash

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

selectable replication factor

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

links between data sets can be stored

Transaction concepts

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

multiple readers, single writer

ACID

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

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.

User concepts

Access control

Users with fine-grained authorization concept on 4 levels

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

Access rights for users can be defined per database

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes, using Riak Security

More information provided by the system vendor

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