DBMS > Couchbase vs. dBASE vs. Firebird vs. IRONdb

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. dBASE vs. Firebird vs. IRONdb

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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

dBase was one of the first databases with a development environment on PC's. Its latest version dBase V is still sold as dBase classic, which needs a DOS Emulation. The up-to-date product is dBase plus.

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

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

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	16.59
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	9.70
Rank	#44	Overall
	#28	Relational DBMS

Score	20.50
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Website

www.couchbase.com

www.dbase.com

www.firebirdsql.org

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

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

www.dbase.com/support/knowledgebase

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

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

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Asthon Tate

Firebird Foundation

Circonus LLC.

Initial release

2011

1979

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2017

Current release

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

dBASE 2019, 2019

5.0.0, January 2024

V0.10.20, January 2018

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

commercial

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

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++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

DOS

dBase Classic
Windows

dBase Pro

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

text, numeric, histograms

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)

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

none

The IDE can access other DBMS or ODBC-sources.

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

HTTP API

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

dBase proprietary IDE

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

The IDE can access stored procedures in other database systems.

PSQL

yes, in Lua

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

none

Automatic, metric affinity per node

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

none

Source-replica replication

configurable replication factor, datacenter aware

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

not for dBase internal data, but IDE does support transactions when accessing external DBMS

ACID

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

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.

Access rights for users and roles

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

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