DBMS > Firebird vs. FoundationDB vs. Google Cloud Datastore vs. MySQL vs. Postgres-XL

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. FoundationDB vs. Google Cloud Datastore vs. MySQL vs. Postgres-XL

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market. As a consequence, the product was removed from the DB-Engines ranking. In April 2018, Apple open-sourced FoundationDB and it therefore reappears in the ranking.

Description

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

Ordered key-value store. Core features are complimented by layers.

Automatically scaling NoSQL Database as a Service (DBaaS) on the Google Cloud Platform

Widely used open source RDBMS

Based on PostgreSQL enhanced with MPP and write-scale-out cluster features

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Document store

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	21.06
Rank	#31	Overall
	#19	Relational DBMS

Score	1.07
Rank	#188	Overall
	#31	Document stores
	#28	Key-value stores
	#86	Relational DBMS

Score	4.49
Rank	#79	Overall
	#12	Document stores

Score	1087.72
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	0.52
Rank	#256	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

github.com/apple/foundationdb

cloud.google.com/datastore

www.mysql.com

www.postgres-xl.org

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

apple.github.io/foundationdb

cloud.google.com/datastore/docs

dev.mysql.com/doc

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

Developer

Firebird Foundation

FoundationDB

Google

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2013

2008

1995

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

6.2.28, November 2020

8.3.0, January 2024

10 R1, October 2018

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

Open Source

Mozilla public license

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.

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Implementation language

C and C++

C++

C and C++

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
macOS

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

some layers support schemas

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

some layers support typing

yes, details here

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

XML type, but no XML query functionality

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

supported in specific SQL layer only

SQL-like query language (GQL)

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

.Net
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Erlang
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

in SQL-layer only

using Google App Engine

yes

proprietary syntax

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

Callbacks using the Google Apps Engine

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

horizontal partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

yes

Multi-source replication using Paxos

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Linearizable consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on type of query and configuration

Strong Consistency is default for entity lookups and queries within an Entity Group (but can instead be made eventually consistent). Other queries are always eventual consistent.

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

in SQL-layer only

yes

via ReferenceProperties or Ancestor paths

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Serializable Isolation within Transactions, Read Committed outside of Transactions

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

MVCC

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

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

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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