DBMS > Firebird vs. HyperSQL vs. Milvus vs. Oracle vs. Virtuoso

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. HyperSQL vs. Milvus vs. Oracle vs. Virtuoso

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

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

Widely used RDBMS

Virtuoso is a multi-model hybrid-RDBMS that supports management of data represented as relational tables and/or property graphs

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Native XML DBMS
Relational DBMS
RDF store
Search engine

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
RDF store

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
Spatial DBMS

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
Vector DBMS

since Oracle 23

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	3.49
Rank	#87	Overall
	#47	Relational DBMS

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	1236.29
Rank	#1	Overall
	#1	Relational DBMS

Score	4.26
Rank	#78	Overall
	#13	Document stores
	#4	Graph DBMS
	#2	Native XML DBMS
	#42	Relational DBMS
	#2	RDF stores
	#9	Search engines

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

hsqldb.org

milvus.io

www.oracle.com/database

virtuoso.openlinksw.com

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

hsqldb.org/web/hsqlDocsFrame.html

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

docs.oracle.com/en/database

docs.openlinksw.com/virtuoso

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Oracle

OpenLink Software

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2001

2019

1980

1998

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

2.7.2, June 2023

2.3.4, January 2024

23c, September 2023

7.2.11, September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

based on BSD license

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

GPLv2, extended commercial license available

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.

Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Implementation language

C and C++

Java

C++, Go

C and C++

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

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows
z/OS

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

Schemaless in JSON and XML columns

yes

SQL - Standard relational schema
RDF - Quad (S, P, O, G) or Triple (S, P, O)
XML - DTD, XML Schema
DAV - freeform filesystem objects, plus User Defined Types a/k/a Dynamic Extension Type

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

SQL-92, SQL-200x, SQL-3, SQLX

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

HTTP API

JDBC via HTTP
JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

ADO.NET
GeoSPARQL
HTTP API
JDBC
Jena RDF API
ODBC
OLE DB
RDF4J API
RESTful HTTP API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SOAP webservices
SPARQL 1.1
WebDAV
XPath
XQuery
XSLT

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC
Java

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

C
C#
C++
Clojure
Cobol
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Fortran
Groovy
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Objective C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Tcl
Visual Basic

.Net
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Visual Basic

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

Java, SQL

PL/SQL

also stored procedures in Java possible

yes

Virtuoso PL

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

none

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Chain, star, and bi-directional replication
Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

can be realized in PL/SQL

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

isolation level can be parameterized

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

Version 12c introduced the new option 'Oracle Database In-Memory'

yes

User concepts

Access control

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Fine-grained Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) in addition to typical coarse-grained Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) according to SQL-standard. Pluggable authentication with supported standards (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos)

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Milvus is an open-source and cloud-native vector database built for production-ready...
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Virtuoso is a modern multi-model RDBMS for managing data represented as tabular relations...
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Competitive advantages

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
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Performance & Scale — as exemplified by DBpedia and the LOD Cloud it spawned, i.e.,...
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Typical application scenarios

RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
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Used for — Analytics/BI Conceptual Data Virtualization Enterprise Knowledge Graphs...
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Key customers

Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
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Broad use across enterprises and governments including — European Union (EU) US Government...
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Market metrics

As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
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Largest installed-base of Multi-Model RDBMS for AI-friendly Knowledge Graphs Platform...
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Licensing and pricing models

Milvus was released under the open-source Apache License 2.0 in October 2019. Fully-managed...
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Available in both Commercial Enterprise and Open Source (GPL v2) Editions Feature...
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