DBMS > Firebird vs. Google BigQuery vs. Google Cloud Datastore vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. Google BigQuery vs. Google Cloud Datastore vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Large scale data warehouse service with append-only tables

Automatically scaling NoSQL Database as a Service (DBaaS) on the Google Cloud Platform

Widely used in-process key-value store

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

Key-value store

supports sorted and unsorted key sets
Native XML DBMS

in the Oracle Berkeley DB XML version

Relational DBMS

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

Score	20.50
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	58.10
Rank	#19	Overall
	#13	Relational DBMS

Score	4.36
Rank	#72	Overall
	#12	Document stores

Score	2.01
Rank	#126	Overall
	#21	Key-value stores
	#3	Native XML DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

cloud.google.com/bigquery

cloud.google.com/datastore

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/berkeleydb.html

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs

cloud.google.com/datastore/docs

docs.oracle.com/cd/E17076_05/html/index.html

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Google

Oracle

originally developed by Sleepycat, which was acquired by Oracle

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2010

2008

1994

2014

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

18.1.40, May 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Open Source

commercial license available

commercial

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++

C, Java, C++ (depending on the Berkeley DB edition)

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

hosted

AIX
Android
FreeBSD
iOS
Linux
OS X
Solaris
VxWorks
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

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

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes, details here

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

only with the Berkeley DB XML edition

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language (GQL)

yes

SQL interfaced based on SQLite is available

yes

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net

Figaro is a .Net framework assembly that extends Berkeley DB XML into an embeddable database engine for .NET
others

Third-party libraries to manipulate Berkeley DB files are available for many languages
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party binding
Perl
Python
Tcl

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

user defined functions

in JavaScript

using Google App Engine

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

Callbacks using the Google Apps Engine

yes

only for the SQL API

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

none

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication using Paxos

Source-replica replication

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on type of query and configuration

Strong Consistency is default for entity lookups and queries within an Entity Group (but can instead be made eventually consistent). Other queries are always eventual consistent.

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

via ReferenceProperties or Ancestor paths

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Since BigQuery is designed for querying data

ACID

Serializable Isolation within Transactions, Read Committed outside of Transactions

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

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

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)

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

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