DBMS > Firebird vs. Google Cloud Datastore vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Postgres-XL vs. Quasardb

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. Google Cloud Datastore vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Postgres-XL vs. Quasardb

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

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Based on PostgreSQL enhanced with MPP and write-scale-out cluster features

Distributed, high-performance timeseries database

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	0.49
Rank	#256	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Score	0.14
Rank	#332	Overall
	#29	Time Series DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

cloud.google.com/datastore

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

www.postgres-xl.org

quasar.ai

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

cloud.google.com/datastore/docs

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

doc.quasar.ai/master

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Google

Microsoft

quasardb

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2008

1989

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

2009

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

10 R1, October 2018

3.14.1, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Mozilla public license

commercial

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

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++

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

hosted

Linux
Windows

Linux
macOS

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes, details here

yes

integer and binary

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

XML type, but no XML query functionality

Secondary indexes

yes

with tags

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language (GQL)

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

SQL-like query language

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
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

HTTP API

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++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Erlang
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

using Google App Engine

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

Callbacks using the Google Apps Engine

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

horizontal partitioning

Sharding

consistent hashing

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication using Paxos

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Source-replica replication with selectable replication factor

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

with Hadoop integration

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

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Serializable Isolation within Transactions, Read Committed outside of Transactions

ACID

MVCC

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

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

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Cryptographically strong user authentication and audit trail

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