DBMS > Firebird vs. FoundationDB vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Postgres-XL vs. Titan

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. FoundationDB vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Postgres-XL vs. Titan

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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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

Titan has been decommisioned after the takeover by Datastax. It will be removed from the DB-Engines ranking. A fork has been open-sourced as JanusGraph.

Description

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

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

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

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

Titan is a Graph DBMS optimized for distributed clusters.

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Document store
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	27.71
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	0.53
Rank	#254	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

github.com/apple/foundationdb

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

www.postgres-xl.org

github.com/thinkaurelius/titan

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

apple.github.io/foundationdb

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

github.com/thinkaurelius/titan/wiki

Developer

Firebird Foundation

FoundationDB

Microsoft

Aurelius, owned by DataStax

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2013

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

2012

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

6.2.28, November 2020

10 R1, October 2018

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

Apache license, version 2.0

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.

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

hosted

Linux
macOS

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

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

JSON types

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

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

supported in specific SQL layer only

SQL-like query language

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

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

Java API
TinkerPop Blueprints
TinkerPop Frames
TinkerPop Gremlin
TinkerPop Rexster

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#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

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

Clojure
Java
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

in SQL-layer only

JavaScript

user defined functions

yes

Triggers

yes

JavaScript

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

horizontal partitioning

yes

via pluggable storage backends

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

yes

via Faunus, a graph analytics engine

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Linearizable consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

in SQL-layer only

yes

Relationships in graph

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

ACID

MVCC

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

Supports various storage backends: Cassandra, HBase, Berkeley DB, Akiban, Hazelcast

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

User concepts

Access control

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

User authentification and security via Rexster Graph Server

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