DBMS > Firebird vs. GraphDB vs. IBM Db2 vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. SAP HANA

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. GraphDB vs. IBM Db2 vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. SAP HANA

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Enterprise-ready RDF and graph database with efficient reasoning, cluster and external index synchronization support. It supports also SQL JDBC access to Knowledge Graph and GraphQL over SPARQL.

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

Database as a Service offering with high compatibility to Microsoft SQL Server

In-memory, column based data store. Available as appliance or cloud service

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS
RDF store

Relational DBMS

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

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
RDF store

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

with Db2 Spatial Extender

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

with SAP Hana, Enterprise Edition
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	3.32
Rank	#91	Overall
	#6	Graph DBMS
	#4	RDF stores

Score	128.46
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	77.99
Rank	#16	Overall
	#11	Relational DBMS

Score	44.69
Rank	#22	Overall
	#16	Relational DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

www.ontotext.com

www.ibm.com/products/db2

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/azure-sql/database

www.sap.com/products/hana.html

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

graphdb.ontotext.com/documentation

www.ibm.com/docs/en/db2

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql

help.sap.com/hana

Social network pages

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Ontotext

IBM

Microsoft

SAP

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2000

1983

host version

2010

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

10.4, October 2023

12.1, October 2016

V12

2.0 SPS07 (April 4, 2023), April 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Some plugins of GraphDB Workbench are open sourced

commercial

free version is available

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

also available as a cloud based service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Implementation language

C and C++

Java

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

All OS with a Java VM
Linux
OS X
Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Windows
z/OS

hosted

Appliance or cloud-service

Data scheme

yes

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support; RDF shapes

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

yes, supports real-time synchronization and indexing in SOLR/Elastic search/Lucene and GeoSPARQL geometry data indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

stored SPARQL accessed as SQL using Apache Calcite through JDBC/ODBC

yes

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

GeoSPARQL
GraphQL
GraphQL Federation
Java API
JDBC
RDF4J API
RDFS
RIO
Sail API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL 1.1

ADO.NET
JDBC
JSON style queries

MongoDB compatible
ODBC
XQuery

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C#
Clojure
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

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

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

well-defined plugin interfaces; JavaScript server-side extensibility

yes

Transact SQL

SQLScript, R

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

only with Windows/Unix/Linux Version

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication

yes

with separate tools (MQ, InfoSphere)

yes, with always 3 replicas available

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency, Eventual consistency (configurable in cluster mode per master or individual client request)

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Constraint checking

yes

Transaction concepts

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

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

User concepts

Access control

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

Default Basic authentication through RDF4J client, or via Java when run with cURL, default token-based in the Workbench or via Rest API, optional access through OpenID or Kerberos single sign-on.

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Ontotext GraphDB is a semantic database engine that allows organizations to build...
» more

Competitive advantages

GraphDB allows you to link text and data in big knowledge graphs. It’s easy to experiment...
» more

Typical application scenarios

Metadata enrichment and management, linked data publishing, semantic inferencing...
» more

Key customers

GraphDB provides a platform for building next-generation AI and Knowledge Graph...
» more

Market metrics

GraphDB is the most utilized semantic triplestore for mission-critical enterprise...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

GraphDB Free is a non-commercial version and is free to use. GraphDB Enterprise edition...
» more

News

Case study: Policy Enforcement Automation With Semantics
2 May 2024

Okay, RAG… We Have a Problem
26 April 2024

Scaling Understanding with the Help of Feedback Loops, Knowledge Graphs and NLP
19 April 2024

How Knowledge Graphs Power Data Mesh and Data Fabric
10 April 2024

Building Smarter Financial Services: The Role of Semantic Technologies, Knowledge Graphs and Generative AI
3 April 2024

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.