DBMS > Firebird vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. MySQL vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. XTDB

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. MySQL vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. XTDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Widely used open source RDBMS

Widely used in-process key-value store

A general purpose database with bitemporal SQL and Datalog and graph queries

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Key-value store

supports sorted and unsorted key sets
Native XML DBMS

in the Oracle Berkeley DB XML version

Document store

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	20.50
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	821.56
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	1061.34
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	2.01
Rank	#126	Overall
	#21	Key-value stores
	#3	Native XML DBMS

Score	0.18
Rank	#332	Overall
	#46	Document stores

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

www.mysql.com

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

github.com/xtdb/xtdb
www.xtdb.com

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

dev.mysql.com/doc

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

www.xtdb.com/docs

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Microsoft

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Oracle

originally developed by Sleepycat, which was acquired by Oracle

Juxt Ltd.

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

1989

1995

1994

2019

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

8.4.0, April 2024

18.1.40, May 2020

1.19, September 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

Open Source

commercial license available

Open Source

MIT License

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

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Implementation language

C and C++

C++

C and C++

C, Java, C++ (depending on the Berkeley DB edition)

Clojure

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

AIX
Android
FreeBSD
iOS
Linux
OS X
Solaris
VxWorks
Windows

All OS with a Java 8 (and higher) VM
Linux

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes, extensible-data-notation format

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

limited SQL, making use of Apache Calcite

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

HTTP REST
JDBC

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
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

Clojure
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

yes

proprietary syntax

Triggers

yes

only for the SQL API

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication

yes, each node contains all data

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

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

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Features a multi-generational MVCC architecture, readers do not block writers

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, flexibel persistency by using storage technologies like Apache Kafka, RocksDB or LMDB

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

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