DBMS > Firebird vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Oracle Rdb vs. Snowflake vs. Teradata Aster

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Oracle Rdb vs. Snowflake vs. Teradata Aster

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Teradata Aster has been integrated into other Teradata systems and therefore will be removed from the DB-Engines ranking.

Description

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

A horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service. It is the externalization of the core Google database that runs the biggest aspects of Google, like Ads and Google Play.

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

Platform for big data analytics on multistructured data sources and types

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

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

Score	20.50
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	2.84
Rank	#100	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Score	1.14
Rank	#178	Overall
	#80	Relational DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

cloud.google.com/spanner

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

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/rdb-doc.html

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Google

Oracle, originally developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Teradata

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2017

1984

2014

2005

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

7.4.1.1, 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

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++

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

hosted

HP Open VMS

hosted

Linux

Data scheme

yes

Flexible Schema (defined schema, partial schema, schema free)

yes

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

Flexible Schema (defined schema, partial schema, schema free)

defined schema within the relational store; partial schema or schema free in the Aster File Store

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

in Aster File Store

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C
C#
C++
Java
Python
R

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

user defined functions

R packages

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

yes

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

yes

Dimension tables are replicated across all nodes in the cluster. The number of replicas for the file store can be configured.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

yes

SQL Map-Reduce Framework

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

yes, on a single node

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.

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)

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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