DBMS > Firebird vs. FoundationDB vs. HEAVY.AI vs. jBASE vs. Microsoft SQL Server

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. FoundationDB vs. HEAVY.AI vs. jBASE vs. Microsoft SQL Server

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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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

A high performance, column-oriented RDBMS, specifically developed to harness the massive parallelism of modern CPU and GPU hardware

A robust multi-value DBMS comprising development tools and middleware

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Relational DBMS

Multivalue DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	20.50
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	1.06
Rank	#185	Overall
	#31	Document stores
	#28	Key-value stores
	#85	Relational DBMS

Score	1.64
Rank	#145	Overall
	#67	Relational DBMS

Score	1.49
Rank	#156	Overall
	#3	Multivalue DBMS

Score	821.56
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

github.com/apple/foundationdb

github.com/heavyai/heavydb
www.heavy.ai

www.rocketsoftware.com/products/rocket-multivalue-application-development-platform/rocket-jbase

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

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

apple.github.io/foundationdb

docs.heavy.ai

docs.rocketsoftware.com/bundle?labelkey=jbase_5.9

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

Developer

Firebird Foundation

FoundationDB

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

Rocket Software (formerly Zumasys)

Microsoft

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2013

2016

1991

1989

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

6.2.28, November 2020

5.10, January 2022

5.7

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

commercial

restricted free version is available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C and C++

C++

C++ and CUDA

C++

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

AIX
Linux
Windows

Linux
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

some layers support schemas

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

some layers support typing

yes

optional

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

supported in specific SQL layer only

yes

Embedded SQL for jBASE in BASIC

yes

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
RESTful HTTP API
SOAP-based API

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

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

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

.Net
Basic
Jabbascript
Java

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

in SQL-layer only

yes

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

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Round robin

Sharding

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

yes

Multi-source replication

yes

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

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

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

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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