DBMS > dBASE vs. Firebird vs. H2 vs. HyperSQL

System Properties Comparison dBASE vs. Firebird vs. H2 vs. HyperSQL

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

dBase was one of the first databases with a development environment on PC's. Its latest version dBase V is still sold as dBase classic, which needs a DOS Emulation. The up-to-date product is dBase plus.

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	10.34
Rank	#44	Overall
	#28	Relational DBMS

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

Website

Technical documentation

www.dbase.com/support/knowledgebase

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

hsqldb.org/web/hsqlDocsFrame.html

Developer

Asthon Tate

Firebird Foundation

Thomas Mueller

Initial release

1979

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2005

2001

Current release

dBASE 2019, 2019

5.0.0, January 2024

2.2.220, July 2023

2.7.2, June 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

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

Open Source

based on BSD license

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud 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

Server operating systems

DOS

dBase Classic
Windows

dBase Pro

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

Data scheme

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

APIs and other access methods

none

The IDE can access other DBMS or ODBC-sources.

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

JDBC
ODBC

HTTP API

JDBC via HTTP
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

dBase proprietary IDE

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Java

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

The IDE can access stored procedures in other database systems.

PSQL

Java Stored Procedures and User-Defined Functions

Java, SQL

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

Source-replica replication

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

none

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

not for dBase internal data, but IDE does support transactions when accessing external DBMS

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

Access rights for users and roles

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

DB-Engines Ranking coverage expanded to 169 database management systems
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