DBMS > Firebird vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Postgres-XL vs. Snowflake vs. TerminusDB

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Postgres-XL vs. Snowflake vs. TerminusDB

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

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

Scalable Graph Database platform making enterprise data available by exploiting inferred entities and relationships

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

Document store
RDF store

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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	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	0.23
Rank	#316	Overall
	#27	Graph DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

www.postgres-xl.org

www.snowflake.com

terminusdb.com

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

terminusdb.github.io/terminusdb/#

Developer

Firebird Foundation

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Snowflake Computing Inc.

DataChemist Ltd.

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2010

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

2014

2018

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

10 R1, October 2018

11.0.0, January 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Open Source

Mozilla public license

commercial

Open Source

GPL V3

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C and C++

Erlang

Prolog, Rust

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

hosted

Linux
macOS

hosted

Linux

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

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

yes

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

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

yes

SQL-like query language (WOQL)

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

OWL
RESTful HTTP API
WOQL (Web Object Query Language)

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

JavaScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

user defined functions

yes

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

yes

Graph Partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Journaling Streams

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

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 journaling

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

Role-based access control

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