DBMS > Firebird vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. ToroDB

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. ToroDB

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

ToroDB seems to be discontinued. Therefore it is excluded from the DB-Engines Ranking.

Description

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

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.)

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

A MongoDB-compatible JSON document store, built on top of PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Document store

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	29.04
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

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

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

github.com/torodb/server

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Microsoft

8Kdata

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

1992

2014

2016

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

Open Source

AGPL-V3

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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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

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

hosted

All OS with a Java 7 VM

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

yes

string, integer, double, boolean, date, object_id

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

JavaScript

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

JavaScript

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

none

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Eventual Consistency
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

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

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

but no files for transaction logging

yes

User concepts

Access control

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

a simple user-level security was built in till version Access 2003

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

Access rights for users and roles

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