DBMS > Firebird vs. FoundationDB vs. Interbase vs. Postgres-XL vs. SQLite

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. FoundationDB vs. Interbase vs. Postgres-XL 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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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.

Light-weight proven RDBMS

originally from Borland

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

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

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	1.03
Rank	#190	Overall
	#31	Document stores
	#28	Key-value stores
	#89	Relational DBMS

Score	4.61
Rank	#72	Overall
	#39	Relational DBMS

Score	0.49
Rank	#256	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Score	114.32
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

github.com/apple/foundationdb

www.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

www.postgres-xl.org

www.sqlite.org

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

apple.github.io/foundationdb

docs.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

Developer

Firebird Foundation

FoundationDB

Embarcadero

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2013

1984

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

2000

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

6.2.28, November 2020

InterBase 2020, December 2019

10 R1, October 2018

3.46.0 (23 May 2024), May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

Mozilla public 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++

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Android
iOS
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
macOS

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.

export as XML data possible

yes

XML type, but no XML query functionality

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

supported in specific SQL layer only

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

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

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

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java
Object Pascal
PHP
Ruby

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

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

yes

Interbase procedure and trigger language

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

none

horizontal partitioning

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

yes

Interbase Change Views

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

MVCC

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

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

yes

Multiversion concurreny control

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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