DBMS > dBASE vs. Derby vs. Firebird vs. Google Cloud Bigtable vs. SAP HANA

System Properties Comparison dBASE vs. Derby vs. Firebird vs. Google Cloud Bigtable vs. SAP HANA

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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.

Full-featured RDBMS with a small footprint, either embedded into a Java application or used as a database server.

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

Google's NoSQL Big Data database service. It's the same database that powers many core Google services, including Search, Analytics, Maps, and Gmail.

In-memory, column based data store. Available as appliance or cloud service

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS

with SAP Hana, Enterprise Edition
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	10.34
Rank	#44	Overall
	#28	Relational DBMS

Score	4.71
Rank	#69	Overall
	#37	Relational DBMS

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	3.26
Rank	#92	Overall
	#13	Key-value stores
	#8	Wide column stores

Score	44.69
Rank	#22	Overall
	#16	Relational DBMS

Website

www.dbase.com

db.apache.org/derby

www.firebirdsql.org

cloud.google.com/bigtable

www.sap.com/products/hana.html

Technical documentation

www.dbase.com/support/knowledgebase

db.apache.org/derby/manuals/index.html

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs

help.sap.com/hana

Developer

Asthon Tate

Apache Software Foundation

Firebird Foundation

Google

SAP

Initial release

1979

1997

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2015

2010

Current release

dBASE 2019, 2019

10.17.1.0, November 2023

5.0.0, January 2024

2.0 SPS07 (April 4, 2023), April 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

also available as a cloud based service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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

Implementation language

Java

C and C++

Server operating systems

DOS

dBase Classic
Windows

dBase Pro

All OS with a Java VM

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

hosted

Appliance or cloud-service

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

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

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

APIs and other access methods

none

The IDE can access other DBMS or ODBC-sources.

JDBC

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
HappyBase (Python library)
HBase compatible API (Java)

JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

dBase proprietary IDE

Java

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

The IDE can access stored procedures in other database systems.

Java Stored Procedures

PSQL

SQLScript, R

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

Source-replica replication

Internal replication in Colossus, and regional replication between two clusters in different zones

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Immediate consistency (for a single cluster), Eventual consistency (for two or more replicated clusters)

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

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

ACID

Atomic single-row operations

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

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users and roles

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

yes

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