DBMS > Firebird vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Postgres-XL vs. SAP SQL Anywhere vs. SQLite

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Postgres-XL vs. SAP SQL Anywhere vs. SQLite

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Based on PostgreSQL enhanced with MPP and write-scale-out cluster features

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

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	21.06
Rank	#31	Overall
	#19	Relational DBMS

Score	29.85
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	0.52
Rank	#256	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Score	4.57
Rank	#78	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	116.01
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

www.postgres-xl.org

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

www.sqlite.org

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

help.sap.com/docs/SAP_SQL_Anywhere

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Microsoft

SAP

formerly Sybase

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

1992

2000

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

10 R1, October 2018

17, July 2015

3.45.3 (15 April 2024), April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Open Source

Mozilla public license

commercial

Open Source

Public Domain

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

Linux
macOS

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

server-less

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

dynamic column types

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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

XML type, but no XML query functionality

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

ADO.NET
HTTP API
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Erlang
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

JavaScript

user defined functions

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

Triggers

yes

JavaScript

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

horizontal partitioning

none

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

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

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

ACID

MVCC

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

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

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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