DBMS > Firebird vs. MariaDB vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. Oracle NoSQL vs. RavenDB

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. MariaDB vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. Oracle NoSQL vs. RavenDB

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.

Widely used in-process key-value store

A multi-model, scalable, distributed NoSQL database, designed to provide highly reliable, flexible, and available data management across a configurable set of storage nodes

Open Source Operational and Transactional Enterprise NoSQL Document Database

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

supports sorted and unsorted key sets
Native XML DBMS

in the Oracle Berkeley DB XML version

Document store
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Document store

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS

with OQGraph storage engine
Spatial DBMS

Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

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

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	93.21
Rank	#13	Overall
	#9	Relational DBMS

Score	2.21
Rank	#117	Overall
	#20	Key-value stores
	#3	Native XML DBMS

Score	2.95
Rank	#100	Overall
	#17	Document stores
	#17	Key-value stores
	#50	Relational DBMS

Score	2.92
Rank	#101	Overall
	#18	Document stores

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/berkeleydb.html

www.oracle.com/database/nosql/technologies/nosql

ravendb.net

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

docs.oracle.com/cd/E17076_05/html/index.html

docs.oracle.com/en/database/other-databases/nosql-database/index.html

ravendb.net/docs

Developer

Firebird Foundation

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

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

Oracle

originally developed by Sleepycat, which was acquired by Oracle

Oracle

Hibernating Rhinos

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

1994

2011

2010

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

11.3.2, February 2024

18.1.40, May 2020

23.3, December 2023

5.4, July 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription available

Open Source

commercial license available

Open Source

Proprietary for Enterprise Edition (Oracle Database EE license has Oracle NoSQL database EE covered: details)

Open Source

AGPL version 3, commercial license available

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++ (depending on the Berkeley DB edition)

Java

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

AIX
Android
FreeBSD
iOS
Linux
OS X
Solaris
VxWorks
Windows

Linux
Solaris SPARC/x86

Linux
macOS
Raspberry Pi
Windows

Data scheme

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

schema-free

Support Fixed schema and Schema-less deployment with the ability to interoperate between them.

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

optional

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

only with the Berkeley DB XML edition

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

SQL interfaced based on SQLite is available

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

SQL-like query language (RQL)

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

RESTful HTTP API

.NET Client API
F# Client API
Go Client API
Java Client API
NodeJS Client API
PHP Client API
Python Client API
RESTful HTTP API

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

Figaro is a .Net framework assembly that extends Berkeley DB XML into an embeddable database engine for .NET
others

Third-party libraries to manipulate Berkeley DB files are available for many languages
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party binding
Perl
Python
Tcl

C
C#
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

yes

PL/SQL compatibility added with version 10.3

yes

Triggers

yes

only for the SQL API

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

none

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication

Electable source-replica replication per shard. Support distributed global deployment with Multi-region table feature

Multi-source replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

with Hadoop integration

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

depending on configuration

Default ACID transactions on the local node (eventually consistent across the cluster). Atomic operations with cluster-wide ACID transactions. Eventual consistency for indexes and full-text search indexes.

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

configurable

ACID within a storage node (=shard)

ACID, Cluster-wide transaction available

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

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

off heap cache

User concepts

Access control

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights for users and roles

Authorization levels configured per client per database

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

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.