DBMS > Firebird vs. FoundationDB vs. H2 vs. HyperSQL vs. SQLite

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. FoundationDB vs. H2 vs. HyperSQL vs. SQLite

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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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.

Full-featured RDBMS with a small footprint, either embedded into a Java application or used as a database server.

Multithreaded, transactional RDBMS written in Java

also known as HSQLDB

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	19.46
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	0.97
Rank	#191	Overall
	#32	Document stores
	#28	Key-value stores
	#87	Relational DBMS

Score	7.57
Rank	#47	Overall
	#30	Relational DBMS

Score	3.14
Rank	#85	Overall
	#46	Relational DBMS

Score	103.35
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

github.com/apple/foundationdb

www.h2database.com

hsqldb.org

www.sqlite.org

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

apple.github.io/foundationdb

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

hsqldb.org/web/hsqlDocsFrame.html

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

Developer

Firebird Foundation

FoundationDB

Thomas Mueller

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2013

2005

2001

2000

Current release

5.0.1, August 2024

6.2.28, November 2020

2.2.220, July 2023

2.7.2, June 2023

3.46.1 (13 August 2024), August 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

dual-licence (Mozilla public license, Eclipse public license)

Open Source

based on BSD license

Open Source

Public Domain

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.

Implementation language

C and C++

C++

Java

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

Embedded (into Java applications) and Client-Server operating modes

server-less

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

some layers support schemas

yes

dynamic column types

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

some layers support typing

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

supported in specific SQL layer only

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

JDBC
ODBC

HTTP API

JDBC via HTTP
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

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

Java

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC
Java

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

in SQL-layer only

Java Stored Procedures and User-Defined Functions

Java, SQL

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

yes

With clustering: 2 database servers on different computers operate on identical copies of a database

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Linearizable consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

in SQL-layer only

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

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

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

yes

via file-system locks

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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