DBMS > Firebird vs. Google Cloud Datastore vs. Microsoft Access vs. MySQL vs. Spark SQL

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. Google Cloud Datastore vs. Microsoft Access vs. MySQL vs. Spark SQL

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

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

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 open source RDBMS

Spark SQL is a component on top of 'Spark Core' for structured data processing

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	4.47
Rank	#76	Overall
	#12	Document stores

Score	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	1083.74
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	18.96
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

cloud.google.com/datastore

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

www.mysql.com

spark.apache.org/sql

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

cloud.google.com/datastore/docs

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

dev.mysql.com/doc

spark.apache.org/docs/latest/sql-programming-guide.html

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Google

Microsoft

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Apache Software Foundation

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2008

1992

1995

2014

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

8.4.0, April 2024

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C and C++

C++

C and C++

Scala

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

hosted

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

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

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language (GQL)

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

yes

with proprietary extensions

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

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

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

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

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Java
Python
R
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

using Google App Engine

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

proprietary syntax

Triggers

yes

Callbacks using the Google Apps Engine

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

none

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

yes, utilizing Spark Core

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication using Paxos

none

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

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 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

not for MyISAM storage engine

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Serializable Isolation within Transactions, Read Committed outside of Transactions

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

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

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

yes

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

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

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

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