DBMS > dBASE vs. Firebird vs. Google BigQuery vs. Google Cloud Bigtable vs. Oracle

System Properties Comparison dBASE vs. Firebird vs. Google BigQuery vs. Google Cloud Bigtable vs. Oracle

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

Large scale data warehouse service with append-only tables

Google's NoSQL Big Data database service. It's the same database that powers many core Google services, including Search, Analytics, Maps, and Gmail.

Widely used RDBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
RDF store

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
Spatial DBMS

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
Vector DBMS

since Oracle 23

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

Score	9.70
Rank	#44	Overall
	#28	Relational DBMS

Score	20.50
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	58.10
Rank	#19	Overall
	#13	Relational DBMS

Score	3.15
Rank	#95	Overall
	#14	Key-value stores
	#8	Wide column stores

Score	1244.08
Rank	#1	Overall
	#1	Relational DBMS

Website

www.dbase.com

www.firebirdsql.org

cloud.google.com/bigquery

cloud.google.com/bigtable

www.oracle.com/database

Technical documentation

www.dbase.com/support/knowledgebase

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs

cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs

docs.oracle.com/en/database

Developer

Asthon Tate

Firebird Foundation

Google

Oracle

Initial release

1979

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2010

2015

1980

Current release

dBASE 2019, 2019

5.0.0, January 2024

23c, September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

restricted free version is 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++

Server operating systems

DOS

dBase Classic
Windows

dBase Pro

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

hosted

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows
z/OS

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

Schemaless in JSON and XML columns

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

with proprietary extensions

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

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
HappyBase (Python library)
HBase compatible API (Java)

JDBC
ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

Supported programming languages

dBase proprietary IDE

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

C
C#
C++
Clojure
Cobol
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Fortran
Groovy
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Objective C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Tcl
Visual Basic

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

The IDE can access stored procedures in other database systems.

PSQL

user defined functions

in JavaScript

PL/SQL

also stored procedures in Java possible

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

Source-replica replication

Internal replication in Colossus, and regional replication between two clusters in different zones

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

can be realized in PL/SQL

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Immediate consistency (for a single cluster), Eventual consistency (for two or more replicated clusters)

Immediate 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

Since BigQuery is designed for querying data

Atomic single-row operations

ACID

isolation level can be parameterized

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

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

Version 12c introduced the new option 'Oracle Database In-Memory'

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users and roles

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

Access privileges (owner, writer, reader) on dataset, table or view level

Google Cloud Identity & Access Management (IAM)

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.