DBMS > Firebird vs. H2 vs. HyperSQL vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Oracle Berkeley DB

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. H2 vs. HyperSQL vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Oracle Berkeley DB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Full-featured RDBMS with a small footprint, either embedded into a Java application or used as a database server.

Multithreaded, transactional RDBMS written in Java

also known as HSQLDB

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Widely used in-process key-value store

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

supports sorted and unsorted key sets
Native XML DBMS

in the Oracle Berkeley DB XML version

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	8.13
Rank	#49	Overall
	#31	Relational DBMS

Score	3.49
Rank	#87	Overall
	#47	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	2.21
Rank	#117	Overall
	#20	Key-value stores
	#3	Native XML DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

www.h2database.com

hsqldb.org

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

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

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

hsqldb.org/web/hsqlDocsFrame.html

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

docs.oracle.com/cd/E17076_05/html/index.html

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Thomas Mueller

Microsoft

Oracle

originally developed by Sleepycat, which was acquired by Oracle

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2005

2001

1989

1994

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

2.2.220, July 2023

2.7.2, June 2023

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

18.1.40, May 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

dual-licence (Mozilla public license, Eclipse public license)

Open Source

based on BSD license

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

commercial license available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

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Implementation language

C and C++

Java

C++

C, Java, C++ (depending on the Berkeley DB edition)

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

Embedded (into Java applications) and Client-Server operating modes

Linux
Windows

AIX
Android
FreeBSD
iOS
Linux
OS X
Solaris
VxWorks
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

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

only with the Berkeley DB XML edition

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL interfaced based on SQLite is available

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

JDBC
ODBC

HTTP API

JDBC via HTTP
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Java

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC
Java

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

.Net

Figaro is a .Net framework assembly that extends Berkeley DB XML into an embeddable database engine for .NET
others

Third-party libraries to manipulate Berkeley DB files are available for many languages
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party binding
Perl
Python
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

Java Stored Procedures and User-Defined Functions

Java, SQL

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

Triggers

yes

only for the SQL API

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

With clustering: 2 database servers on different computers operate on identical copies of a database

none

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

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

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