DBMS > Firebird vs. IBM Cloudant vs. RocksDB vs. SwayDB vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. IBM Cloudant vs. RocksDB vs. SwayDB vs. TimescaleDB

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

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

An embeddable, non-blocking, type-safe key-value store for single or multiple disks and in-memory storage

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Relational DBMS

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	3.65
Rank	#85	Overall
	#11	Key-value stores

Score	0.00
Rank	#382	Overall
	#59	Key-value stores

Score	4.64
Rank	#71	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

rocksdb.org

swaydb.simer.au

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Firebird Foundation

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Facebook, Inc.

Simer Plaha

Timescale

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2010

2013

2018

2017

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

8.11.4, April 2024

2.13.0, November 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Open Source

BSD

Open Source

GNU Affero GPL V3.0

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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

C++

Scala

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

hosted

Linux

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

C++ API
Java API

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

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

C
C++
Go
Java
Perl
Python
Ruby

Java
Kotlin
Scala

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

none

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

none

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

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

yes

Atomic execution of operations

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 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

Access rights for users can be defined per database

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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