DBMS > Derby vs. Firebird vs. Microsoft Access vs. OpenSearch

System Properties Comparison Derby vs. Firebird vs. Microsoft Access vs. OpenSearch

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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.)

A distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine forked from Elasticsearch and based on Apache Lucene

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Secondary database models

Vector 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	16.36
Rank	#37	Overall
	#4	Search engines

Website

db.apache.org/derby

www.firebirdsql.org

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

github.com/opensearch-project
opensearch.org

Technical documentation

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

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

opensearch.org/docs/latest

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Firebird Foundation

Microsoft

Amazon Web Services

Initial release

1997

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

1992

2021

Current release

10.17.1.0, November 2023

5.0.0, January 2024

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

2.5.0, January 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

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.

STACKIT OpenSearch offers OpenSearch in a managed version in enterprise grade, 100% GDPR-compliant, for a wide range of applications like analytics, website search, offering scalability and fast data access.
Aiven for OpenSearch: Fully managed open source search and analytics suite. Out-of-the-box integrations get you up and running in a couple of clicks.

Implementation language

Java

C and C++

C++

Java

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

All OS with a Java VM

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

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

All search fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

JDBC

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

Elasticsearch client

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Java Stored Procedures

PSQL

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

none

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

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

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

OpenSearch is a highly scalable and extensible open-source software suite for search,...
» more

Competitive advantages

Distributed as fully open source under Apache License, Version 2.0 (ALv2), OpenSearch...
» more

Typical application scenarios

The OpenSearch platform is used across a broad range of search , analytics, and observability...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

The OpenSearch Project offers open source software licensed under Apache License...
» more

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