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DBMS > Firebird vs. FoundationDB vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Milvus

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. FoundationDB vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Milvus

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines
NameFirebird  Xexclude from comparisonFoundationDB  Xexclude from comparisonIBM Cloudant  Xexclude from comparisonMilvus  Xexclude from comparison
Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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.
DescriptionFirebird is an open source RDBMS forked from Borland's InterBaseOrdered key-value store. Core features are complimented by layers.Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDBA DBMS designed for efficient storage of vector data and vector similarity searches
Primary database modelRelational DBMSDocument store infosupported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS infosupported via specific SQL-layer
Document storeVector DBMS
DB-Engines Ranking infomeasures the popularity of database management systemsranking trend
Trend Chart
Score20.50
Rank#30  Overall
#18  Relational DBMS
Score1.06
Rank#185  Overall
#31  Document stores
#28  Key-value stores
#85  Relational DBMS
Score2.75
Rank#104  Overall
#19  Document stores
Score2.78
Rank#103  Overall
#4  Vector DBMS
Websitewww.firebirdsql.orggithub.com/­apple/­foundationdbwww.ibm.com/­products/­cloudantmilvus.io
Technical documentationwww.firebirdsql.org/­en/­reference-manualsapple.github.io/­foundationdbcloud.ibm.com/­docs/­Cloudantmilvus.io/­docs/­overview.md
DeveloperFirebird FoundationFoundationDBIBM, Apache Software Foundation infoIBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014
Initial release2000 infoAs fork of Borland's InterBase201320102019
Current release5.0.0, January 20246.2.28, November 20202.4.4, May 2024
License infoCommercial or Open SourceOpen Source infoInitial Developer's Public LicenseOpen Source infoApache 2.0commercialOpen Source infoApache Version 2.0
Cloud-based only infoOnly available as a cloud servicenonoyesno
DBaaS offerings (sponsored links) infoDatabase as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.
Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus
Implementation languageC and C++C++ErlangC++, Go
Server operating systemsAIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less infoFirebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows
Linux
OS X
Windows
hostedLinux
macOS info10.14 or later
Windows infowith WSL 2 enabled
Data schemeyesschema-free infosome layers support schemasschema-free
Typing infopredefined data types such as float or dateyesno infosome layers support typingnoVector, Numeric and String
XML support infoSome form of processing data in XML format, e.g. support for XML data structures, and/or support for XPath, XQuery or XSLT.nono
Secondary indexesyesnoyesno
SQL infoSupport of SQLyessupported in specific SQL layer onlynono
APIs and other access methodsADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC infoJaybird
ODBC
OLE DB
RESTful HTTP/JSON APIRESTful HTTP API
Supported programming languagesC
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript infoNode.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript infoNode.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift
C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Server-side scripts infoStored proceduresPSQLin SQL-layer onlyView functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScriptno
Triggersyesnoyesno
Partitioning methods infoMethods for storing different data on different nodesnoneShardingShardingSharding
Replication methods infoMethods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodesSource-replica replicationyesMulti-source replication
Source-replica replication
MapReduce infoOffers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methodsnonoyesno
Consistency concepts infoMethods to ensure consistency in a distributed systemLinearizable consistencyEventual ConsistencyBounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency
Foreign keys infoReferential integrityyesin SQL-layer onlynono
Transaction concepts infoSupport to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of dataACIDACIDno infoatomic operations within a document possibleno
Concurrency infoSupport for concurrent manipulation of datayes infoFeatures a multi-generational MVCC architecture, readers do not block writersyesyes infoOptimistic lockingyes
Durability infoSupport for making data persistentyesyesyesyes
In-memory capabilities infoIs there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.noyes
User concepts infoAccess controlUsers with fine-grained authorization conceptnoAccess rights for users can be defined per databaseRole based access control and fine grained access rights
More information provided by the system vendor
FirebirdFoundationDBIBM CloudantMilvus
Specific characteristicsMilvus is an open-source and cloud-native vector database built for production-ready...
» more
Competitive advantagesHighly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
» more
Typical application scenariosRAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
» more
Key customersMilvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
» more
Market metricsAs of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations​ ​ 3k+ enterprise...
» more
Licensing and pricing modelsMilvus was released under the open-source Apache License 2.0 in October 2019. Fully-managed...
» more

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FirebirdFoundationDBIBM CloudantMilvus
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