DBMS > Derby vs. Firebird vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft SQL Server

System Properties Comparison Derby vs. Firebird vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft SQL Server

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

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.)

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	4.71
Rank	#69	Overall
	#37	Relational DBMS

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Website

db.apache.org/derby

www.firebirdsql.org

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

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

Technical documentation

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

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Firebird Foundation

Microsoft

Initial release

1997

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

1992

1989

Current release

10.17.1.0, November 2023

5.0.0, January 2024

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

restricted free version is available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

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Implementation language

Java

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

Linux
Windows

Data scheme

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

but not compliant to any SQL standard

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

Supported programming languages

Java

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Java Stored Procedures

PSQL

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

none

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

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

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

but no files for transaction logging

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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