DBMS > Firebird vs. Interbase vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Oracle Coherence

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. Interbase vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Oracle Coherence

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

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.)

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Oracles in-memory data grid solution

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	20.50
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	4.08
Rank	#75	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	101.16
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	821.56
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	1.97
Rank	#129	Overall
	#22	Key-value stores

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

www.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

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

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

www.oracle.com/java/coherence

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

docs.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

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

docs.oracle.com/en/middleware/standalone/coherence

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Embarcadero

Microsoft

Oracle

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

1984

1992

1989

2007

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

InterBase 2020, December 2019

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

14.1, August 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

restricted free version is available

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

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Implementation language

C and C++

C++

Java

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Android
iOS
Linux
OS X
Windows

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

Linux
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

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

but not compliant to any SQL standard

yes

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

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

JCache
JPA
RESTful HTTP 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

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

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

.Net
C++
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

yes

Interbase procedure and trigger language

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

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

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

Live Events

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

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

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

Interbase Change Views

none

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

yes, with selectable consistency level

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
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

configurable

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

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

yes

Multiversion concurreny control

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

but no files for transaction logging

yes

optionally

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

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

authentification to access the cache via certificates or http basic authentication

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