DBMS > Firebird vs. Interbase vs. Lovefield vs. MySQL

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. Interbase vs. Lovefield vs. MySQL

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Light-weight proven RDBMS

originally from Borland

Embeddable relational database for web apps written in pure JavaScript

Widely used open source RDBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	19.46
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	3.78
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	0.22
Rank	#306	Overall
	#138	Relational DBMS

Score	1029.49
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

www.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

google.github.io/lovefield

www.mysql.com

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

docs.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

github.com/google/lovefield/blob/master/docs/spec_index.md

dev.mysql.com/doc

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Embarcadero

Google

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

1984

2014

1995

Current release

5.0.1, August 2024

InterBase 2020, December 2019

2.1.12, February 2017

9.0.0, July 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Implementation language

C and C++

JavaScript

C and C++

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Android
iOS
Linux
OS X
Windows

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

tested with Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

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.

export as XML data possible

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language

via JavaScript builder pattern

yes

with proprietary extensions

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java
Object Pascal
PHP
Ruby

JavaScript

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

yes

Interbase procedure and trigger language

yes

proprietary syntax

Triggers

yes

Using read-only observers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

Interbase Change Views

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

not for MyISAM storage engine

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

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

yes

Multiversion concurreny control

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, by using IndexedDB or the cloud service Firebase Realtime Database

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

using MemoryDB

yes

User concepts

Access control

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

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