DBMS > Firebird vs. Ingres vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. STSdb vs. VoltDB

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. Ingres vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. STSdb vs. VoltDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Well established RDBMS

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Key-Value Store with special method for indexing

optimized for high performance using a special indexing method

Distributed In-Memory NewSQL RDBMS

Used for OLTP applications with a high frequency of relatively simple transactions, that can hold all their data in memory

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	4.11
Rank	#81	Overall
	#44	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	0.04
Rank	#360	Overall
	#52	Key-value stores

Score	1.44
Rank	#158	Overall
	#73	Relational DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

www.actian.com/databases/ingres

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

github.com/STSSoft/STSdb4

www.voltdb.com

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

docs.actian.com/ingres

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

docs.voltdb.com

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Actian Corporation

Microsoft

STS Soft SC

VoltDB Inc.

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

1974

originally developed at University Berkely in early 1970s

1989

2011

2010

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

11.2, May 2022

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

4.0.8, September 2015

11.3, April 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

GPLv2, commercial license available

Open Source

AGPL for Community Edition, commercial license for Enterprise, AWS, and Pro Editions

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

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Implementation language

C and C++

C++

Java, C++

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

AIX
HP Open VMS
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Windows

Linux
Windows

Windows

Linux
OS X

for development

Data scheme

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

primitive types and user defined types (classes)

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.

but tools for importing/exporting data from/to XML-files available

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

only a subset of SQL 99

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

.NET Client API
JDBC
ODBC
proprietary protocol (OpenAPI)

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

.NET Client API

Java API
JDBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

C#
Java

C#
C++
Erlang

not officially supported
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

yes

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

Java

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

horizontal partitioning

Ingres Star to access multiple databases simultaneously

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

none

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

Ingres Replicator

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

none

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

FOREIGN KEY constraints are not supported

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Transactions are executed single-threaded within stored procedures

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

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

yes

MVCC

yes

Data access is serialized by the server

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Snapshots and command logging

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users and roles with access to stored procedures

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