DBMS > Firebird vs. Interbase vs. MariaDB vs. NuoDB

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. Interbase vs. MariaDB vs. NuoDB

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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

MySQL application compatible open source RDBMS, enhanced with high availability, security, interoperability and performance capabilities. MariaDB ColumnStore provides a column-oriented storage engine and MariaDB Xpand supports distributed SQL.

NuoDB is a webscale distributed database that supports SQL and ACID transactions

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS

with OQGraph storage engine
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	4.61
Rank	#72	Overall
	#39	Relational DBMS

Score	93.21
Rank	#13	Overall
	#9	Relational DBMS

Score	0.89
Rank	#198	Overall
	#92	Relational DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

www.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

www.3ds.com/nuodb-distributed-sql-database

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

docs.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

doc.nuodb.com

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Embarcadero

MariaDB Corporation Ab (MariaDB Enterprise),
MariaDB Foundation (community MariaDB Server)

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

Dassault Systèmes

originally NuoDB, Inc.

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

1984

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

2013

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

InterBase 2020, December 2019

11.3.2, February 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription available

commercial

limited edition free

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.

STACKIT MariaDB offers MariaDB in a fully managed version in enterprise grade, 100% GDPR-compliant.

Implementation language

C and C++

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

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

hosted

Amazon EC2, Windows Azure, SoftLayer
Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

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

with proprietary extensions

yes

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

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

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

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

yes

Interbase procedure and trigger language

yes

PL/SQL compatibility added with version 10.3

Java, SQL

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

data is dynamically stored/cached on the nodes where it is read/written

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

Interbase Change Views

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Managed transparently by NuoDB

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

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

tunable commit protocol

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

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

yes

Multiversion concurreny control

yes

MVCC

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

not for in-memory storage engine

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

with MEMORY storage engine

yes

Temporary table

User concepts

Access control

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Standard SQL roles/ privileges, Administrative Users

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

MariaDB is the most powerful open source relational database – modern SQL and JSON...
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Competitive advantages

MariaDB Servers have many features unavailable in other open source relational databases....
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Typical application scenarios

Web, SaaS and Cloud operational applications that require high availability, scalability...
» more

Key customers

Deutsche Bank, DBS Bank, Nasdaq, Red Hat, ServiceNow, Verizon and Walgreens Featured...
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Market metrics

MariaDB is the default database in the LAMP stack supplied by Red Hat and SUSE Linux,...
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Licensing and pricing models

MariaDB plc subscriptions cover our free, open source database, Community Server,...
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