DBMS > Fauna vs. FileMaker vs. Firebird vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

System Properties Comparison Fauna vs. FileMaker vs. Firebird vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Fauna provides a web-native interface, with support for GraphQL and custom business logic that integrates seamlessly with the rest of the serverless ecosystem. The underlying globally distributed storage and compute platform is fast, consistent, and reliable, with a modern security infrastructure.

FileMaker is a cross-platform RDBMS that includes a GUI frontend.

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

Search-as-a-service for web and mobile app development

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Primary database model

Document store
Graph DBMS
Relational DBMS
Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	1.55
Rank	#151	Overall
	#26	Document stores
	#14	Graph DBMS
	#71	Relational DBMS
	#13	Time Series DBMS

Score	47.91
Rank	#20	Overall
	#14	Relational DBMS

Score	20.50
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	5.52
Rank	#59	Overall
	#6	Search engines

Score	27.71
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Website

fauna.com

www.claris.com/filemaker

www.firebirdsql.org

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/search

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

Technical documentation

docs.fauna.com

www.claris.com/resources/documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

Developer

Fauna, Inc.

Claris

a subsidiary of Apple

Firebird Foundation

Microsoft

Initial release

2014

1983

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2015

2014

Current release

19.4.1, November 2021

5.0.0, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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

Implementation language

Scala

C and C++

Server operating systems

hosted

iOS

client part only
Linux
OS X
Windows

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

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

A http query request can return the data in XML format

Secondary indexes

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

via plugins

yes

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

Filemaker WebDirect
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

RESTful HTTP API

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

Supported programming languages

C#
Go
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby
Scala
Swift

PHP

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

yes

PSQL

JavaScript

Triggers

yes

JavaScript

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

horizontal partitioning

consistent hashing

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

Source-replica replication, warm standby

since Version 14

Source-replica replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

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.

User concepts

Access control

Identity management, authentication, and access control

simple rights management via user accounts and connection to external directory services

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

yes

using Azure authentication

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

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