DBMS > Firebird vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. NuoDB vs. Oracle

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. NuoDB vs. Oracle

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Database as a Service offering with high compatibility to Microsoft SQL Server

NuoDB is a webscale distributed database that supports SQL and ACID transactions

Widely used RDBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

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

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	77.99
Rank	#16	Overall
	#11	Relational DBMS

Score	0.89
Rank	#198	Overall
	#92	Relational DBMS

Score	1236.29
Rank	#1	Overall
	#1	Relational DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/azure-sql/database

www.3ds.com/nuodb-distributed-sql-database

www.oracle.com/database

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql

doc.nuodb.com

docs.oracle.com/en/database

Developer

Firebird Foundation

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Microsoft

Dassault Systèmes

originally NuoDB, Inc.

Oracle

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2010

2013

1980

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

V12

23c, September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

limited edition free

commercial

restricted free version is 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.

Implementation language

C and C++

Erlang

C++

C and C++

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

hosted

Amazon EC2, Windows Azure, SoftLayer
Linux
OS X
Windows

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

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

Schemaless in JSON and XML columns

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

with proprietary extensions

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

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

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

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

Transact SQL

Java, SQL

PL/SQL

also stored procedures in Java possible

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

data is dynamically stored/cached on the nodes where it is read/written

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes, with always 3 replicas available

yes

Managed transparently by NuoDB

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

can be realized in PL/SQL

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

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

tunable commit protocol

ACID

isolation level can be parameterized

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

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

yes

Optimistic locking

yes

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

Temporary table

yes

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

User concepts

Access control

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

Access rights for users can be defined per database

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Standard SQL roles/ privileges, Administrative Users

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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