DBMS > Drizzle vs. Firebird vs. Interbase vs. Microsoft Azure Table Storage vs. Microsoft SQL Server

System Properties Comparison Drizzle vs. Firebird vs. Interbase vs. Microsoft Azure Table Storage vs. Microsoft SQL Server

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Drizzle has published its last release in September 2012. The open-source project is discontinued and Drizzle is excluded from the DB-Engines ranking.

Description

MySQL fork with a pluggable micro-kernel and with an emphasis of performance over compatibility.

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

Light-weight proven RDBMS

originally from Borland

A Wide Column Store for rapid development using massive semi-structured datasets

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	4.61
Rank	#72	Overall
	#39	Relational DBMS

Score	4.48
Rank	#75	Overall
	#6	Wide column stores

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

www.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/storage/tables

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

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

docs.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

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

Developer

Drizzle project, originally started by Brian Aker

Firebird Foundation

Embarcadero

Microsoft

Initial release

2008

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

1984

2012

1989

Current release

7.2.4, September 2012

5.0.0, January 2024

InterBase 2020, December 2019

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

GNU GPL

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

restricted free version is available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C++

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Android
iOS
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
Windows

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.

export as XML data possible

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP API

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

Supported programming languages

C
C++
Java
PHP

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java
Object Pascal
PHP
Ruby

.Net
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

yes

Interbase procedure and trigger language

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

Triggers

hooks for callbacks inside the server can be used.

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication

Interbase Change Views

yes

implicit feature of the cloud service. Replication either local, cross-facility or geo-redundant.

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

optimistic locking

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Features a multi-generational MVCC architecture, readers do not block writers

yes

Multiversion concurreny control

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

Pluggable authentication mechanisms

e.g. LDAP, HTTP

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights based on private key authentication or shared access signatures

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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