DBMS > Firebird vs. Interbase vs. Microsoft Access vs. Oracle Coherence vs. Tarantool

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. Interbase vs. Microsoft Access vs. Oracle Coherence vs. Tarantool

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.)

Oracles in-memory data grid solution

In-memory computing platform with a flexible data schema for efficiently building high-performance applications

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

Document store
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

with Tarantool/GIS extension

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	1.97
Rank	#129	Overall
	#22	Key-value stores

Score	1.67
Rank	#143	Overall
	#25	Document stores
	#25	Key-value stores
	#65	Relational DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

www.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

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

www.oracle.com/java/coherence

www.tarantool.io

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

docs.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

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

www.tarantool.io/en/doc

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Embarcadero

Microsoft

Oracle

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

1984

1992

2007

2008

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

InterBase 2020, December 2019

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

14.1, August 2023

2.10.0, May 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

Open Source

BSD-2, source-available extensions (modules), commercial licenses for Tarantool Enterprise

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++

C++

Java

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

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

All OS with a Java VM

BSD
Linux
macOS

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Flexible data schema: relational definition for tables with ability to store json-like documents in columns

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, double, decimal, uuid, integer, blob, boolean, datetime

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

Full-featured ANSI SQL support

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

JCache
JPA
RESTful HTTP API

Open binary protocol

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

.Net
C++
Java

C
C#
C++
Erlang
Go
Java
JavaScript
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Rust

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

yes

Interbase procedure and trigger language

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

Lua, C and SQL stored procedures

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

Live Events

yes, before/after data modification events, on replication events, client session events

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Sharding, partitioned with virtual buckets by user defined affinity key. Live resharding for scale up and scale down without maintenance downtime.

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

Interbase Change Views

none

yes, with selectable consistency level

Asynchronous replication with multi-master option
Configurable replication topology (full-mesh, chain, star)
Synchronous quorum replication (with Raft)

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

Casual consistency across sharding partitions
Eventual consistency within replicaset partition

when using asyncronous replication
Immediate Consistency within single instance
Sequential consistency including linearizable read within replicaset partition

when using Raft

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

configurable

ACID, with serializable isolation and linearizable read (within partition); Configurable MVCC (within partition); No cross-shard distributed transactions

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

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

yes

Multiversion concurreny control

yes

yes, cooperative multitasking

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

but no files for transaction logging

yes

optionally

yes, write ahead logging

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

yes, full featured in-memory storage engine with persistence

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

authentification to access the cache via certificates or http basic authentication

Access Control Lists
Mutual TLS authentication for Tarantol Enterprise
Password based authentication
Role-based access control (RBAC) and LDAP for Tarantol Enterprise
Users and Roles

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More resources

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