DBMS > Firebird vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. SAP IQ vs. ScyllaDB vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. SAP IQ vs. ScyllaDB vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

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.

Columnar RDBMS optimized for Big Data analytics

Cassandra and DynamoDB compatible wide column store

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

column-oriented

Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Key-value store

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	2.64
Rank	#108	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	4.08
Rank	#76	Overall
	#5	Wide column stores

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.sap.com/products/technology-platform/sybase-iq-big-data-management.html

www.scylladb.com

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

help.sap.com/docs/SAP_IQ

docs.scylladb.com

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Google

SAP, formerly Sybase

ScyllaDB

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2017

1994

2015

2014

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

16.1 SPS04, April 2019

ScyllaDB Open Source 5.4.1, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Open Source

Open Source (AGPL), 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.

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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

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Windows

Linux

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

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

cluster global secondary indices

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

SQL-like DML and DDL statements (CQL)

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

Proprietary protocol (CQL)

compatible with CQL (Cassandra Query Language, an SQL-like language)
RESTful HTTP API (DynamoDB compatible)
Thrift

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C
C#
C++
Java
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

For CQL interface: C#, C++, Clojure, Erlang, Go, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Node.js, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, Scala
For DynamoDB interface: .Net, ColdFusion, Erlang, Groovy, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

yes

yes, Lua

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

shared disk or shared nothing architectures with SAP IQ Multiplexer

Sharding

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

SAP/Sybase Replication Server

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Hadoop integration

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Tunable Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Immediate Consistency

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

ACID

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

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

in-memory tables

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

Access rights for users can be defined per object

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

ScyllaDB is engineered to deliver predictable performance at scale. It’s adopted...
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Competitive advantages

Highly-performant (efficiently utilizes full resources of a node and network; millions...
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Typical application scenarios

ScyllaDB is ideal for applications that require high throughput and low latency at...
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Key customers

Discord, Epic Games, Expedia, Zillow, Comcast, Disney+ Hotstar, Samsung, ShareChat,...
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Market metrics

ScyllaDB typically offers ~75% total cost of ownership savings, with ~5X higher throughput...
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Licensing and pricing models

ScyllaDB Open Source - free open source software (AGPL) ScyllaDB Enterprise - subscription-based...
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