DBMS > Firebird vs. GBase vs. Ignite vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft SQL Server

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. GBase vs. Ignite vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft SQL Server

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.

Apache Ignite is a memory-centric distributed database, caching, and processing platform for transactional, analytical, and streaming workloads, delivering in-memory speeds at petabyte scale.

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

If a column is of type dynamic docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/scalar-data-types/dynamic then it's possible to add arbitrary JSON documents in this cell
Event Store

this is the general usage pattern at Microsoft. Billing, Logs, Telemetry events are stored in ADX and the state of an individual entity is defined by the arg_max(timestamps)
Spatial DBMS
Search engine

support for complex search expressions docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/parseoperator FTS, Geospatial docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/geo-point-to-geohash-function distributed search -> ADX acts as a distributed search engine
Time Series DBMS

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer/time-series-analysis

Document store
Graph DBMS
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	3.16
Rank	#96	Overall
	#15	Key-value stores
	#49	Relational DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

www.gbase.cn

ignite.apache.org

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

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

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

apacheignite.readme.io/docs

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer

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

Developer

Firebird Foundation

General Data Technology Co., Ltd.

Apache Software Foundation

Microsoft

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2004

2015

2019

1989

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

GBase 8a, GBase 8s, GBase 8c

Apache Ignite 2.6

cloud service with continuous releases

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

restricted free version is available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C and C++

C, Java, Python

C++, Java, .Net

C++

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Linux
Windows

Data scheme

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

bool, datetime, dynamic, guid, int, long, real, string, timespan, double: docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/scalar-data-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 fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Standard with numerous extensions

ANSI-99 for query and DML statements, subset of DDL

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
C API
JDBC
ODBC

HDFS API
Hibernate
JCache
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data

Microsoft SQL Server communication protocol (MS-TDS)
RESTful HTTP 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

C#
C++
Java
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PowerShell
Python
R

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

user defined functions

yes (compute grid and cache interceptors can be used instead)

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

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

Triggers

yes

yes (cache interceptors and events)

yes

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/management/updatepolicy

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

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

yes (replicated cache)

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service. Replication either local, cross-facility or geo-redundant.

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes (compute grid and hadoop accelerator)

Spark connector (open source): github.com/Azure/azure-kusto-spark

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

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

yes

Security Hooks for custom implementations

Azure Active Directory Authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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