DBMS > Firebird vs. Heroic vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Snowflake vs. SurrealDB

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. Heroic vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Snowflake vs. SurrealDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Time Series DBMS built at Spotify based on Cassandra or Google Cloud Bigtable, and ElasticSearch

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

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

A fully ACID transactional, developer-friendly, multi-model DBMS

Primary database model

Document store
Graph DBMS

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

Score	20.50
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	0.46
Rank	#265	Overall
	#22	Time Series DBMS

Score	2.75
Rank	#104	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	1.02
Rank	#190	Overall
	#33	Document stores
	#18	Graph DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

github.com/spotify/heroic

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

www.snowflake.com

surrealdb.com

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

spotify.github.io/heroic

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

surrealdb.com/docs

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Spotify

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Snowflake Computing Inc.

SurrealDB Ltd

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2014

2010

2014

2022

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

v1.5.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

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

Erlang

Rust

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

hosted

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

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

Secondary indexes

yes

via Elasticsearch

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

HQL (Heroic Query Language, a JSON-based language)
HTTP API

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

GraphQL
RESTful HTTP API
WebSocket

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Deno
Go
JavaScript (Node.js)
Rust

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

ACID

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Features a multi-generational MVCC architecture, readers do not block writers

yes

Optimistic locking

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.

User concepts

Access control

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

Access rights for users can be defined per database

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

yes, based on authentication and database rules

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