DBMS > Firebird vs. Geode vs. MariaDB vs. Microsoft Access vs. ToroDB

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. Geode vs. MariaDB vs. Microsoft Access vs. ToroDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

ToroDB seems to be discontinued. Therefore it is excluded from the DB-Engines Ranking.

Description

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

Geode is a distributed data container, pooling memory, CPU, network resources, and optionally local disk across multiple processes

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.

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.)

A MongoDB-compatible JSON document store, built on top of PostgreSQL

Primary database model

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	20.50
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	1.86
Rank	#134	Overall
	#24	Key-value stores

Score	91.04
Rank	#13	Overall
	#9	Relational DBMS

Score	101.16
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

geode.apache.org

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

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

github.com/torodb/server

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

geode.apache.org/docs

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Originally developed by Gemstone. They outsourced the project to Apache in 2015 but still deliver a commercial version as Gemfire.

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

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

Microsoft

8Kdata

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2002

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

1992

2016

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

1.1, February 2017

11.3.2, February 2024

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

Apache Version 2; commercial licenses available as Gemfire

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription available

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

Open Source

AGPL-V3

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.

STACKIT MariaDB offers MariaDB in a fully managed version in enterprise grade, 100% GDPR-compliant.

Implementation language

C and C++

Java

C and C++

C++

Java

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

the JDK (8 or later) is also required

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

All OS with a Java 7 VM

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, integer, double, boolean, date, object_id

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

SQL-like query language (OQL)

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

Java Client API
Memcached protocol
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
All JVM based languages
C++
Groovy
Java
Scala

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

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

user defined functions

yes

PL/SQL compatibility added with version 10.3

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

Triggers

yes

Cache Event Listeners

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

none

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

yes, on a single node

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

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

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

with MEMORY storage engine

User concepts

Access control

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

Access rights per client and object definable

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

Access rights for users and roles

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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Competitive advantages

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Typical application scenarios

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Key customers

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Market metrics

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Licensing and pricing models

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