DBMS > dBASE vs. Firebird vs. Geode vs. Microsoft Access vs. SQLite

System Properties Comparison dBASE vs. Firebird vs. Geode vs. Microsoft Access vs. SQLite

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

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

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.)

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

Relational 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	1.92
Rank	#131	Overall
	#23	Key-value stores

Score	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	114.32
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Website

www.dbase.com

www.firebirdsql.org

geode.apache.org

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

www.sqlite.org

Technical documentation

www.dbase.com/support/knowledgebase

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

geode.apache.org/docs

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

Developer

Asthon Tate

Firebird Foundation

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

Microsoft

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Initial release

1979

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2002

1992

2000

Current release

dBASE 2019, 2019

5.0.0, January 2024

1.1, February 2017

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

3.45.3 (15 April 2024), April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

Apache Version 2; commercial licenses available as Gemfire

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

Open Source

Public Domain

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++

Java

C++

Server operating systems

DOS

dBase Classic
Windows

dBase Pro

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

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

server-less

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

dynamic column types

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language (OQL)

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

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

Java Client API
Memcached protocol
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

Supported programming languages

dBase proprietary IDE

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

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

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

The IDE can access stored procedures in other database systems.

PSQL

user defined functions

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

Triggers

yes

Cache Event Listeners

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

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

yes, on a single node

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

via file-system locks

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

Access rights for users and roles

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

Access rights per client and object definable

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

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