DBMS > Firebird vs. MariaDB vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. NSDb

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. MariaDB vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. NSDb

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

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.

Database as a Service offering with high compatibility to Microsoft SQL Server

Scalable, High-performance Time Series DBMS designed for Real-time Analytics on top of Kubernetes

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS

with OQGraph storage engine
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	19.46
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	83.44
Rank	#15	Overall
	#10	Relational DBMS

Score	72.95
Rank	#16	Overall
	#11	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#385	Overall
	#40	Time Series DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/azure-sql/database

nsdb.io

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql

nsdb.io/Architecture

Developer

Firebird Foundation

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

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

Microsoft

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

2010

2017

Current release

5.0.1, August 2024

11.5.2, August 2024

V12

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription available

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

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++

Java, Scala

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

hosted

Linux
macOS

Data scheme

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes: int, bigint, decimal, string

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

gRPC
HTTP REST
WebSocket

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
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#
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

Java
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

yes

PL/SQL compatibility added with version 10.3

Transact SQL

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes, with always 3 replicas available

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual 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

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

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

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

not for in-memory storage engine

yes

Using Apache Lucene

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

with MEMORY storage engine

User concepts

Access control

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

MariaDB is the most powerful open source relational database – modern SQL and JSON...
» more

Competitive advantages

MariaDB Servers have many features unavailable in other open source relational databases....
» more

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...
» more

Market metrics

MariaDB is the default database in the LAMP stack supplied by Red Hat and SUSE Linux,...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

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

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