DBMS > Citus vs. Firebird vs. Heroic vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Citus vs. Firebird vs. Heroic vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Scalable hybrid operational and analytics RDBMS for big data use cases based on PostgreSQL

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

Time Series DBMS built at Spotify based on Cassandra or Google Cloud Bigtable, and ElasticSearch

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

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

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store

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

Score	2.15
Rank	#117	Overall
	#56	Relational DBMS

Score	20.50
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	0.46
Rank	#265	Overall
	#22	Time Series DBMS

Score	2.75
Rank	#104	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

www.citusdata.com

www.firebirdsql.org

github.com/spotify/heroic

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

docs.citusdata.com

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

spotify.github.io/heroic

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Spotify

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2010

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2014

2010

2014

Current release

8.1, December 2018

5.0.0, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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++

Java

Erlang

Server operating systems

Linux

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

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

specific XML type available, but no XML query functionality

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

via Elasticsearch

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

standard, with numerous extensions

yes

APIs and other access methods

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

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

HQL (Heroic Query Language, a JSON-based language)
HTTP API

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

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

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

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

PSQL

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

Source-replica replication

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

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

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

Access rights for users can be defined per database

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

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