DBMS > Firebird vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Postgres-XL vs. Realm vs. RocksDB

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Postgres-XL vs. Realm vs. RocksDB

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

Based on PostgreSQL enhanced with MPP and write-scale-out cluster features

A DBMS built for use on mobile devices that’s a fast, easy to use alternative to SQLite and Core Data

Embeddable persistent key-value store optimized for fast storage (flash and RAM)

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	20.50
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	2.75
Rank	#104	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Score	0.53
Rank	#254	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Score	7.41
Rank	#52	Overall
	#8	Document stores

Score	3.41
Rank	#86	Overall
	#11	Key-value stores

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

www.postgres-xl.org

realm.io

rocksdb.org

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

realm.io/docs

github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki

Developer

Firebird Foundation

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

Facebook, Inc.

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2010

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

2014

2013

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

10 R1, October 2018

9.2.1, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Open Source

Mozilla public license

Open Source

BSD

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++

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

hosted

Linux
macOS

Android
Backend: server-less
iOS
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

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

XML type, but no XML query functionality

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

C++ API
Java API

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
C++
Delphi
Erlang
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

.Net
Java

with Android only
Objective-C
React Native
Swift

C
C++
Go
Java
Perl
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

user defined functions

runs within the applications so server-side scripts are unnecessary

Triggers

yes

Change Listeners

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

none

horizontal partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

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

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

MVCC

ACID

yes

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.

yes

In-Memory realm

yes

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

yes

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