DBMS > CouchDB vs. Faircom DB vs. Firebird vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Stardog

System Properties Comparison CouchDB vs. Faircom DB vs. Firebird vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Stardog

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A native JSON - document store inspired by Lotus Notes, scalable from globally distributed server-clusters down to mobile phones.

Native high-speed multi-model DBMS for relational and key-value store data simultaneously accessible through SQL and NoSQL APIs.

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

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Enterprise Knowledge Graph platform and graph DBMS with high availability, high performance reasoning, and virtualization

Primary database model

Document store

Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Graph DBMS
RDF store

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	8.30
Rank	#47	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	0.29
Rank	#304	Overall
	#43	Key-value stores
	#136	Relational DBMS

Score	20.50
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	27.71
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	2.07
Rank	#122	Overall
	#11	Graph DBMS
	#6	RDF stores

Website

couchdb.apache.org

www.faircom.com/products/faircom-db

www.firebirdsql.org

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

www.stardog.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

docs.faircom.com/docs/en/UUID-7446ae34-a1a7-c843-c894-d5322e395184.html

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

docs.stardog.com

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Damien Katz, a former Lotus Notes developer

FairCom Corporation

Firebird Foundation

Microsoft

Stardog-Union

Initial release

2005

1979

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2014

2010

Current release

3.3.3, December 2023

V12, November 2020

5.0.0, January 2024

7.3.0, May 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Restricted, free version available

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

60-day fully-featured trial license; 1-year fully-featured non-commercial use license for academics/students

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

Erlang

ANSI C, C++

C and C++

Java

Server operating systems

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
QNX
SCO
Solaris
VxWorks
Windows

easily portable to other OSs

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

hosted

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

schema free, schema optional, schema required, partial schema,

yes

schema-free

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes, ANSI SQL Types, JSON, typed binary structures

yes

JSON 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.

Import/export of XML data possible

Secondary indexes

yes

via views

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

supports real-time indexing in full-text and geospatial

SQL

Support of SQL

yes, ANSI SQL with proprietary extensions

yes

SQL-like query language

Yes, compatible with all major SQL variants through dedicated BI/SQL Server

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
Direct SQL
JDBC
JPA
ODBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON API
RESTful MQTT/JSON API
RPC

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

GraphQL query language
HTTP API
Jena RDF API
OWL
RDF4J API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SNARL
SPARQL
Spring Data
Stardog Studio
TinkerPop 3

Supported programming languages

C
C#
ColdFusion
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
Ruby
Smalltalk

.Net
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js and browser)
PHP
Python
Visual Basic

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

.Net
Clojure
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

yes

.Net, JavaScript, C/C++

PSQL

JavaScript

user defined functions and aggregates, HTTP Server extensions in Java

Triggers

yes

JavaScript

yes

via event handlers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

File partitioning, horizontal partitioning, sharding

Customizable business rules for table partitioning

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes, configurable to be parallel or serial, synchronous or asynchronous, uni-directional or bi-directional, ACID-consistent or eventually consistent (with custom conflict resolution).

Source-replica replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Multi-source replication in HA-Cluster

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Tunable consistency per server, database, table, and transaction

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Immediate Consistency in HA-Cluster

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

atomic operations within a single document possible

tunable from ACID to Eventually Consistent

ACID

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

yes

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

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Yes, tunable from durable to delayed durability to in-memory

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 can be defined per database

Fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard with additional protections for files

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

Access rights for users and roles

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