DBMS > Firebird vs. Greenplum vs. MySQL vs. PostGIS vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. Greenplum vs. MySQL vs. PostGIS vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Analytic Database platform built on PostgreSQL. Full name is Pivotal Greenplum Database

A logical database in Greenplum is an array of individual PostgreSQL databases working together to present a single database image.

Widely used open source RDBMS

Spatial extension of PostgreSQL

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	20.50
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	8.08
Rank	#48	Overall
	#31	Relational DBMS

Score	1061.34
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	21.72
Rank	#29	Overall
	#1	Spatial DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

docs.greenplum.org

dev.mysql.com/doc

postgis.net/documentation

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Pivotal Software Inc.

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2005

1995

2005

2014

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

7.0.0, September 2023

8.4.0, April 2024

3.4.2, February 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

Open Source

GPL v2.0

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

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Implementation language

C and C++

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

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

since Version 4.2

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C
Java
Perl
Python
R

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

yes

proprietary syntax

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

yes

based on PostgreSQL

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

based on PostgreSQL

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

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

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

yes

based on PostgreSQL

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

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