DBMS > Couchbase vs. Firebird vs. IRONdb vs. Microsoft Access

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. Firebird vs. IRONdb vs. Microsoft Access

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

IRONdb seems to be discontinued. Therefore it is excluded from the DB-Engines Ranking.

Description

A distributed document store with integrated cache, a powerful search engine, in-built operational and analytical capabilities, and an embedded mobile database

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

A distributed Time Series DBMS with a focus on scalability, fault tolerance and operational simplicity

Microsoft Access combines a backend RDBMS (JET / ACE Engine) with a GUI frontend for data manipulation and queries.

The Access frontend is often used for accessing other datasources (DBMS, Excel, etc.)

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Key-value store

originating from the former Membase product and supporting the Memcached protocol
Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

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

Score	16.74
Rank	#33	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	19.46
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	93.76
Rank	#12	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Website

www.couchbase.com

www.firebirdsql.org

www.circonus.com/solutions/time-series-database/

www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/access

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

docs.circonus.com/irondb/category/getting-started

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Firebird Foundation

Circonus LLC.

Microsoft

Initial release

2011

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2017

1992

Current release

Server: 7.2, June 2023; Mobile: 3.1, March 2022; Couchbase Capella (DBaaS), June 2023

5.0.1, August 2024

V0.10.20, January 2018

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Business Source License (BSL 1.1); Commercial licenses also available

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Implementation language

C, C++, Go and Erlang

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

text, numeric, histograms

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL++, extends ANSI SQL to JSON for operational, transactional, and analytic use cases

yes

SQL-like query language (Circonus Analytics Query Language: CAQL)

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

APIs and other access methods

CLI Client
HTTP REST
Kafka Connector
Native language bindings for CRUD, Query, Search and Analytics APIs
Spark Connector
Spring Data

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

HTTP API

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lisp
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Rust
Scala

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java (JDBC-ODBC)
VBA
Visual Basic.NET

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Functions and timers in JavaScript and UDFs in Java, Python, SQL++

PSQL

yes, in Lua

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

none

Automatic, metric affinity per node

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication

configurable replication factor, datacenter aware

none

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

selectable on a per-operation basis

Immediate consistency per node, eventual consistency across nodes

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

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

yes

but no files for transaction logging

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

Ephemeral buckets

User concepts

Access control

User and Administrator separation with password-based and LDAP integrated Authentication. Role-base access control.

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

a simple user-level security was built in till version Access 2003

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