DBMS > Firebird vs. GBase vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. TDSQL for MySQL

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. GBase vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. TDSQL for MySQL

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.

Microsoft Access combines a backend RDBMS (JET / ACE Engine) with a GUI frontend for data manipulation and queries.

The Access frontend is often used for accessing other datasources (DBMS, Excel, etc.)

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

A high-performance distributed database management system with features such as automatic sharding, intelligent operation and maintenance, elastic scalability without downtime, and enterprise-grade security. It is highly compatible with MySQL.

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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	1.07
Rank	#185	Overall
	#86	Relational DBMS

Score	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	0.85
Rank	#205	Overall
	#95	Relational DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

www.gbase.cn

www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/access

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

www.tencentcloud.com/products/dcdb

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

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

www.tencentcloud.com/document/product/1042

Developer

Firebird Foundation

General Data Technology Co., Ltd.

Microsoft

Tencent

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2004

1992

1989

2013

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

GBase 8a, GBase 8s, GBase 8c

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

restricted free version is available

commercial

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++

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

Linux
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Standard with numerous extensions

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

yes

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
C API
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java (JDBC-ODBC)
VBA
Visual Basic.NET

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

C
C#
C++
Java
PHP
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

user defined functions

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

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

yes

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

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

none

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

Automatic sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

yes

none

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

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

but no files for transaction logging

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

a simple user-level security was built in till version Access 2003

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

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