DBMS > Firebird vs. MaxDB vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. MaxDB vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

A robust and reliable RDBMS optimized to run all major SAP solutions

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Search engine

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

Score	19.46
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	2.15
Rank	#115	Overall
	#55	Relational DBMS

Score	133.72
Rank	#7	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	5.97
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

maxdb.sap.com/documentation

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Firebird Foundation

SAP, acquired from Software AG (Adabas-D) in 1997

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

1984

2014

2001

Current release

5.0.1, August 2024

7.9.10.12, February 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Limited community edition free

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

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.

Implementation language

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Windows

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
WebDAV

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C#
Java
Perl
PHP
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

yes

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

yes

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

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

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

In-memory capabilities

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

User concepts

Access control

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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