DBMS > Firebird vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. SAP SQL Anywhere vs. SQLite vs. Virtuoso

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. SAP SQL Anywhere vs. SQLite vs. Virtuoso

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Search-as-a-service for web and mobile app development

RDBMS database and synchronization technologies for server, desktop, remote office, and mobile environments

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

Virtuoso is a multi-model hybrid-RDBMS that supports management of data represented as relational tables and/or property graphs

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Native XML DBMS
Relational DBMS
RDF store
Search engine

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	20.50
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	5.52
Rank	#59	Overall
	#6	Search engines

Score	3.95
Rank	#80	Overall
	#42	Relational DBMS

Score	111.41
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Score	4.27
Rank	#73	Overall
	#13	Document stores
	#4	Graph DBMS
	#2	Native XML DBMS
	#39	Relational DBMS
	#2	RDF stores
	#9	Search engines

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/search

www.sap.com/products/technology-platform/sql-anywhere.html

www.sqlite.org

virtuoso.openlinksw.com

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search

help.sap.com/docs/SAP_SQL_Anywhere

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

docs.openlinksw.com/virtuoso

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Microsoft

SAP

formerly Sybase

Dwayne Richard Hipp

OpenLink Software

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2015

1992

2000

1998

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

17, July 2015

3.46.0 (23 May 2024), May 2024

7.2.11, September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Open Source

Public Domain

Open Source

GPLv2, extended commercial license 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++

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

hosted

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

server-less

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

dynamic column types

yes

SQL - Standard relational schema
RDF - Quad (S, P, O, G) or Triple (S, P, O)
XML - DTD, XML Schema
DAV - freeform filesystem objects, plus User Defined Types a/k/a Dynamic Extension Type

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

yes

SQL-92, SQL-200x, SQL-3, SQLX

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
HTTP API
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

ADO.NET
GeoSPARQL
HTTP API
JDBC
Jena RDF API
ODBC
OLE DB
RDF4J API
RESTful HTTP API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SOAP webservices
SPARQL 1.1
WebDAV
XPath
XQuery
XSLT

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

.Net
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Visual Basic

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

yes, in C/C++, Java, .Net or Perl

yes

Virtuoso PL

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Source-replica replication

Database mirroring

none

Chain, star, and bi-directional replication
Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

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

via file-system locks

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

User concepts

Access control

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

yes

using Azure authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Fine-grained Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) in addition to typical coarse-grained Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) according to SQL-standard. Pluggable authentication with supported standards (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos)

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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Competitive advantages

Performance & Scale — as exemplified by DBpedia and the LOD Cloud it spawned, i.e.,...
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Typical application scenarios

Used for — Analytics/BI Conceptual Data Virtualization Enterprise Knowledge Graphs...
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Key customers

Broad use across enterprises and governments including — European Union (EU) US Government...
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Market metrics

Largest installed-base of Multi-Model RDBMS for AI-friendly Knowledge Graphs Platform...
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Licensing and pricing models

Available in both Commercial Enterprise and Open Source (GPL v2) Editions Feature...
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