DBMS > Firebird vs. GigaSpaces vs. Quasardb vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. GigaSpaces vs. Quasardb vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

High performance in-memory data grid platform, powering three products: Smart Cache, Smart ODS (Operational Data Store), Smart Augmented Transactions

Distributed, high-performance timeseries database

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store
Object oriented DBMS

Values are user defined objects

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Secondary database models

Graph DBMS
Search engine

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

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	0.97
Rank	#192	Overall
	#32	Document stores
	#6	Object oriented DBMS

Score	0.14
Rank	#332	Overall
	#29	Time Series DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

docs.gigaspaces.com/latest/landing.html

doc.quasar.ai/master

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Gigaspaces Technologies

quasardb

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2000

2009

2014

2001

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

15.5, September 2020

3.14.1, January 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

Apache Version 2; Commercial licenses available

commercial

Free community edition, Non-profit organizations and non-commercial usage are eligible for free licenses

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

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++, .Net

C++

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

integer and binary

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.

XML can be used for describing objects metadata

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

with tags

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-99 for query and DML statements

SQL-like query language

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

GigaSpaces LRMI
Hibernate
JCache
JDBC
JPA
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data

HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C++
Java
Python
Scala

.Net
C
C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

yes, event driven architecture

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

consistent hashing

yes

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication

synchronous or asynchronous
Source-replica replication

synchronous or asynchronous

Source-replica replication with selectable replication factor

yes

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Map-Reduce pattern can be built with XAP task executors

with Hadoop integration

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable: ALL, QUORUM, ANY

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

by using LevelDB

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

Transient mode

User concepts

Access control

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

Role-based access control

Cryptographically strong user authentication and audit trail

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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