DBMS > Firebird vs. GridGain vs. Informix vs. SAP IQ vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. GridGain vs. Informix vs. SAP IQ vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

GridGain is an in-memory computing platform, built on Apache Ignite

A secure embeddable database from IBM, positioned besides IBM Db2 as a relatively low-cost product optimized for OLTP and Internet of Things data

Columnar RDBMS optimized for Big Data analytics

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

Since Version 12.10 support for JSON/BSON datatypes compatible with MongoDB

Relational DBMS

column-oriented

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

with Informix TimeSeries Extension

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

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	1.47
Rank	#154	Overall
	#26	Key-value stores
	#72	Relational DBMS

Score	17.87
Rank	#35	Overall
	#22	Relational DBMS

Score	2.75
Rank	#104	Overall
	#53	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

www.gridgain.com

www.ibm.com/products/informix

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

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

www.gridgain.com/docs/index.html

informix.hcldoc.com
www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSGU8G/welcomeIfxServers.html

help.sap.com/docs/SAP_IQ

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Firebird Foundation

GridGain Systems, Inc.

IBM, HCL Technologies

Effective May 1st, 2017, HCL took on development, technical support, and product management teams, and works jointly with IBM on product strategy, marketing, and sales.

SAP, formerly Sybase

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2007

1984

1994

2014

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

GridGain 8.5.1

14.10.FC5, November 2020

16.1 SPS04, April 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

free developer edition 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.

Implementation language

C and C++

Java, C++, .Net

C, C++ and Java

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
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

Since Version 12.10 support for JSON/BSON datatypes

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

ANSI-99 for query and DML statements, subset of DDL

yes

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

HDFS API
Hibernate
JCache
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data

JDBC
JSON API

MongoDB compatible
MQTT (Message Queue Telemetry Transport)
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
C++
Java
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

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

C
C#
C++
Java
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

yes (compute grid and cache interceptors can be used instead)

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

yes (cache interceptors and events)

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

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

yes (replicated cache)

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

SAP/Sybase Replication Server

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes (compute grid and hadoop accelerator)

Hadoop integration

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

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

Security Hooks for custom implementations

Users with fine-grained authentication, authorization, and auditing controls

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

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