DBMS > dBASE vs. Firebird vs. GBase vs. MariaDB vs. NSDb

System Properties Comparison dBASE vs. Firebird vs. GBase vs. MariaDB vs. NSDb

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

dBase was one of the first databases with a development environment on PC's. Its latest version dBase V is still sold as dBase classic, which needs a DOS Emulation. The up-to-date product is dBase plus.

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.

MySQL application compatible open source RDBMS, enhanced with high availability, security, interoperability and performance capabilities. MariaDB ColumnStore provides a column-oriented storage engine and MariaDB Xpand supports distributed SQL.

Scalable, High-performance Time Series DBMS designed for Real-time Analytics on top of Kubernetes

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS

with OQGraph storage engine
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	10.34
Rank	#44	Overall
	#28	Relational DBMS

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	1.07
Rank	#185	Overall
	#86	Relational DBMS

Score	93.21
Rank	#13	Overall
	#9	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#41	Time Series DBMS

Website

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

nsdb.io

Technical documentation

www.dbase.com/support/knowledgebase

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

nsdb.io/Architecture

Developer

Asthon Tate

Firebird Foundation

General Data Technology Co., Ltd.

MariaDB Corporation Ab (MariaDB Enterprise),
MariaDB Foundation (community MariaDB Server)

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

Initial release

1979

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2004

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

2017

Current release

dBASE 2019, 2019

5.0.0, January 2024

GBase 8a, GBase 8s, GBase 8c

11.3.2, February 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

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, Java, Python

C and C++

Java, Scala

Server operating systems

DOS

dBase Classic
Windows

dBase Pro

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

Linux
macOS

Data scheme

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes: int, bigint, decimal, string

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Standard with numerous extensions

yes

with proprietary extensions

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

none

The IDE can access other DBMS or ODBC-sources.

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
C API
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

gRPC
HTTP REST
WebSocket

Supported programming languages

dBase proprietary IDE

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Eiffel
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Java
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

The IDE can access stored procedures in other database systems.

PSQL

user defined functions

yes

PL/SQL compatibility added with version 10.3

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

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

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

Source-replica replication

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

Transaction concepts

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

not for dBase internal data, but IDE does support transactions when accessing external DBMS

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

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

not for in-memory storage engine

Using Apache Lucene

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

with MEMORY storage engine

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users and roles

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

yes

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

MariaDB is the most powerful open source relational database – modern SQL and JSON...
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Competitive advantages

MariaDB Servers have many features unavailable in other open source relational databases....
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Typical application scenarios

Web, SaaS and Cloud operational applications that require high availability, scalability...
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Key customers

Deutsche Bank, DBS Bank, Nasdaq, Red Hat, ServiceNow, Verizon and Walgreens Featured...
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Market metrics

MariaDB is the default database in the LAMP stack supplied by Red Hat and SUSE Linux,...
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Licensing and pricing models

MariaDB plc subscriptions cover our free, open source database, Community Server,...
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