DBMS > Firebird vs. IBM Db2 warehouse vs. Microsoft Access vs. Oracle vs. QuestDB

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. IBM Db2 warehouse vs. Microsoft Access vs. Oracle vs. QuestDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Cloud-based data warehousing service

Microsoft Access combines a backend RDBMS (JET / ACE Engine) with a GUI frontend for data manipulation and queries.

The Access frontend is often used for accessing other datasources (DBMS, Excel, etc.)

Widely used RDBMS

A high performance open source SQL database for time series data

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

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

Relational DBMS

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

Score	20.50
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	1.37
Rank	#160	Overall
	#74	Relational DBMS

Score	101.16
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	1244.08
Rank	#1	Overall
	#1	Relational DBMS

Score	2.70
Rank	#105	Overall
	#8	Time Series DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

www.ibm.com/products/db2/warehouse

www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/access

www.oracle.com/database

questdb.io

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

docs.oracle.com/en/database

questdb.io/docs

Developer

Firebird Foundation

IBM

Microsoft

Oracle

QuestDB Technology Inc

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2014

1992

1980

2014

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

23c, September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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++

C++

C and C++

Java (Zero-GC), C++, Rust

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

hosted

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

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

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

yes

Schemaless in JSON and XML columns

yes

schema-free via InfluxDB Line Protocol

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.

Import/export of XML data possible

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

yes

with proprietary extensions

SQL with time-series extensions

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

.NET Client API
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

JDBC
ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

HTTP REST
InfluxDB Line Protocol (TCP/UDP)
JDBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java (JDBC-ODBC)
VBA
Visual Basic.NET

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

PostgreSQL driver
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Rust

over HTTP

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

PL/SQL, SQL PL

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

PL/SQL

also stored procedures in Java possible

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

none

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

horizontal partitioning (by timestamps)

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

yes

none

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication with eventual consistency

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

can be realized in PL/SQL

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

ACID

isolation level can be parameterized

ACID for single-table writes

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

but no files for transaction logging

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

through memory mapped files

User concepts

Access control

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

a simple user-level security was built in till version Access 2003

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Relational model with native time series support Column-based storage and time partitioned...
» more

Competitive advantages

High ingestion throughput: peak of 4M rows/sec (TSBS Benchmark) Code optimizations...
» more

Typical application scenarios

Financial tick data Industrial IoT Application Metrics Monitoring
» more

Key customers

Banks & Hedge funds, Yahoo, OKX, Airbus, Aquis Exchange, Net App, Cloudera, Airtel,...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Open source Apache 2.0 QuestDB Enterprise QuestDB Cloud
» more

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