DBMS > Firebird vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Oracle vs. VoltDB vs. XTDB

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Oracle vs. VoltDB 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 RDBMS

Distributed In-Memory NewSQL RDBMS

Used for OLTP applications with a high frequency of relatively simple transactions, that can hold all their data in memory

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
RDF store

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
Spatial DBMS

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
Vector DBMS

since Oracle 23

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	1244.08
Rank	#1	Overall
	#1	Relational DBMS

Score	1.47
Rank	#157	Overall
	#73	Relational DBMS

Score	0.18
Rank	#332	Overall
	#46	Document stores

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

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

www.oracle.com/database

www.voltdb.com

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

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

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

docs.oracle.com/en/database

docs.voltdb.com

www.xtdb.com/docs

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Microsoft

Oracle

VoltDB Inc.

Juxt Ltd.

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

1989

1980

2010

2019

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

23c, September 2023

11.3, April 2022

1.19, September 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

restricted free version is available

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

AGPL for Community Edition, commercial license for Enterprise, AWS, and Pro Editions

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++

Java, C++

Clojure

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux
Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows
z/OS

Linux
OS X

for development

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

Data scheme

yes

Schemaless in JSON and XML columns

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

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

only a subset of SQL 99

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)

JDBC
ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

Java API
JDBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON 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

C
C#
C++
Clojure
Cobol
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Fortran
Groovy
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Objective C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Tcl
Visual Basic

C#
C++
Erlang

not officially supported
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python

Clojure
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

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

PL/SQL

also stored procedures in Java possible

Java

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

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

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

Sharding

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

yes, each node contains all data

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

can be realized in PL/SQL

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

FOREIGN KEY constraints are not supported

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

isolation level can be parameterized

ACID

Transactions are executed single-threaded within stored procedures

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

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

yes

Data access is serialized by the server

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Snapshots and command logging

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

Version 12c introduced the new option 'Oracle Database In-Memory'

User concepts

Access control

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users and roles with access to stored procedures

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