DBMS > Firebird vs. Interbase vs. Microsoft Access vs. Newts vs. SAP HANA

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. Interbase vs. Microsoft Access vs. Newts vs. SAP HANA

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.)

Time Series DBMS based on Cassandra

In-memory, column based data store. Available as appliance or cloud service

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS

with SAP Hana, Enterprise Edition
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	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#41	Time Series DBMS

Score	44.69
Rank	#22	Overall
	#16	Relational DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

www.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

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

opennms.github.io/newts

www.sap.com/products/hana.html

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

docs.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

github.com/OpenNMS/newts/wiki

help.sap.com/hana

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Embarcadero

Microsoft

OpenNMS Group

SAP

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

1984

1992

2014

2010

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

InterBase 2020, December 2019

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

2.0 SPS07 (April 4, 2023), April 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

also available as a cloud based service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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

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
OS X
Windows

Appliance or cloud-service

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

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

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

HTTP REST
Java API

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

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

Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

yes

Interbase procedure and trigger language

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

SQLScript, R

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

based on Cassandra

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

Interbase Change Views

none

selectable replication factor

based on Cassandra

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

based on Cassandra
Immediate Consistency

based on Cassandra

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

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

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

yes

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