DBMS > Firebird vs. HyperSQL vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Milvus vs. Oracle Berkeley DB

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. HyperSQL vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Milvus vs. Oracle Berkeley DB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Multithreaded, transactional RDBMS written in Java

also known as HSQLDB

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

A DBMS designed for efficient storage of vector data and vector similarity searches

Widely used in-process key-value store

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Vector 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

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

Score	20.50
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	3.23
Rank	#93	Overall
	#48	Relational DBMS

Score	27.71
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#4	Vector DBMS

Score	2.01
Rank	#126	Overall
	#21	Key-value stores
	#3	Native XML DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

hsqldb.org

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

milvus.io

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

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

hsqldb.org/web/hsqlDocsFrame.html

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

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

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Microsoft

Oracle

originally developed by Sleepycat, which was acquired by Oracle

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2001

2014

2019

1994

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

2.7.2, June 2023

2.4.4, May 2024

18.1.40, May 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

based on BSD license

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

commercial license available

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.

Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Implementation language

C and C++

Java

C++, Go

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

hosted

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

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

JSON types

Vector, Numeric and String

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

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language

yes

SQL interfaced based on SQLite is available

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

HTTP API

JDBC via HTTP
JDBC
ODBC

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC
Java

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.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, SQL

JavaScript

Triggers

yes

JavaScript

yes

only for the SQL API

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

none

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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Competitive advantages

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Typical application scenarios

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Key customers

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Market metrics

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Licensing and pricing models

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