DBMS > Firebird vs. H2 vs. PostgreSQL

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. H2 vs. PostgreSQL

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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.

Widely used open source RDBMS

Developed as objectoriented DBMS (Postgres), gradually enhanced with 'standards' like SQL

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

with object oriented extensions, e.g.: user defined types/functions and inheritance. Handling of key/value pairs with hstore module.

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

with Apache Age
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

with pgvector extension

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

Score	16.74
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Score	7.19
Rank	#48	Overall
	#31	Relational DBMS

Score	667.25
Rank	#4	Overall
	#4	Relational DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

www.h2database.com

www.postgresql.org

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

www.postgresql.org/docs

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Thomas Mueller

PostgreSQL Global Development Group

www.postgresql.org/developer

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2005

1989

1989: Postgres, 1996: PostgreSQL

Current release

5.0.1, August 2024

2.2.220, July 2023

16.4, August 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

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

Open Source

BSD

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

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Implementation language

C and C++

Java

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
NetBSD
OpenBSD
OS X
Solaris
Unix
Windows

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.

yes

specific XML-type available, but no XML query functionality.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

standard with numerous extensions

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Java

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

Java Stored Procedures and User-Defined Functions

user defined functions

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

partitioning by range, list and (since PostgreSQL 11) by hash

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

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

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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