DBMS > dBASE vs. Firebird vs. Google Cloud Bigtable vs. IBM Cloudant vs. IBM Db2

System Properties Comparison dBASE vs. Firebird vs. Google Cloud Bigtable vs. IBM Cloudant vs. IBM Db2

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

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

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Common in IBM host environments, 2 different versions for host and Windows/Linux

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store
Wide column store

Document store

Relational DBMS

Since Version 10.5 support for JSON/BSON documents compatible with MongoDB

Secondary database models

Document store
RDF store

in Db2 LUW (Linux, Unix, Windows)
Spatial DBMS

with Db2 Spatial Extender

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	3.26
Rank	#92	Overall
	#13	Key-value stores
	#8	Wide column stores

Score	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	128.46
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

www.dbase.com

www.firebirdsql.org

cloud.google.com/bigtable

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

www.ibm.com/products/db2

Technical documentation

www.dbase.com/support/knowledgebase

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

www.ibm.com/docs/en/db2

Developer

Asthon Tate

Firebird Foundation

Google

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

IBM

Initial release

1979

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2015

2010

1983

host version

Current release

dBASE 2019, 2019

5.0.0, January 2024

12.1, October 2016

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

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++

Erlang

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
Solaris
Windows
z/OS

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

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

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

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
JDBC
JSON style queries

MongoDB compatible
ODBC
XQuery

Supported programming languages

dBase proprietary IDE

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

C
C#
C++
Cobol
Delphi
Fortran
Java
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Visual Basic

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

The IDE can access stored procedures in other database systems.

PSQL

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

yes

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

only with Windows/Unix/Linux Version

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

yes

with separate tools (MQ, InfoSphere)

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

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

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

Atomic single-row operations

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Features a multi-generational MVCC architecture, readers do not block writers

yes

Optimistic locking

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.

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users and roles

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

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

Access rights for users can be defined per database

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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