DBMS > Firebird vs. Hawkular Metrics vs. Informix vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. Hawkular Metrics vs. Informix vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. TimescaleDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Hawkular metrics is the metric storage of the Red Hat sponsored Hawkular monitoring system. It is based on Cassandra.

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

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

with Informix TimeSeries Extension

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#379	Overall
	#40	Time Series DBMS

Score	17.87
Rank	#35	Overall
	#22	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	4.64
Rank	#71	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

www.hawkular.org

www.ibm.com/products/informix

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

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

www.hawkular.org/hawkular-metrics/docs/user-guide

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

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

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Community supported by Red Hat

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.

Microsoft

Timescale

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2014

1984

1989

2017

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

14.10.FC5, November 2020

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

free developer edition available

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C and C++

Java

C, C++ and Java

C++

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

Linux
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Since Version 12.10 support for JSON/BSON datatypes

yes

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

HTTP REST

JDBC
JSON API

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

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

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

Go
Java
Python
Ruby

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

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

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

yes

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

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

via Hawkular Alerting

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

based on Cassandra

Sharding

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

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

selectable replication factor

based on Cassandra

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

based on Cassandra
Immediate Consistency

based on Cassandra

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

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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