DBMS > Firebird vs. GBase vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. OpenEdge

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. GBase vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. OpenEdge

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Widely used RDBMS in China, including analytical, transactional, distributed transactional, and cloud-native data warehousing.

A horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service. It is the externalization of the core Google database that runs the biggest aspects of Google, like Ads and Google Play.

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Application development environment with integrated database management system

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	1.07
Rank	#185	Overall
	#86	Relational DBMS

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	29.04
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	3.51
Rank	#86	Overall
	#46	Relational DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

www.gbase.cn

cloud.google.com/spanner

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

www.progress.com/openedge

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

documentation.progress.com/output/ua/OpenEdge_latest

Developer

Firebird Foundation

General Data Technology Co., Ltd.

Google

Microsoft

Progress Software Corporation

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2004

2017

2014

1984

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

GBase 8a, GBase 8s, GBase 8c

OpenEdge 12.2, March 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

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, Python

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux

hosted

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

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

Secondary indexes

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Standard with numerous extensions

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

SQL-like query language

yes

close to SQL 92

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
C API
JDBC
ODBC

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

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

JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

Progress proprietary ABL (Advanced Business Language)

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

user defined functions

JavaScript

yes

Triggers

yes

JavaScript

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

horizontal partitioning (by range, list and hash) and vertical partitioning

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

horizontal partitioning

since Version 11.4

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

yes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

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.

User concepts

Access control

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

yes

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

Users and groups

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