DBMS > Firebird vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Riak KV vs. Virtuoso

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Riak KV vs. Virtuoso

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Distributed, fault tolerant key-value store

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

Key-value store

with links between data sets and object tags for the creation of secondary indexes

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

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	4.10
Rank	#82	Overall
	#9	Key-value stores

Score	4.26
Rank	#78	Overall
	#13	Document stores
	#4	Graph DBMS
	#2	Native XML DBMS
	#42	Relational DBMS
	#2	RDF stores
	#9	Search engines

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

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

virtuoso.openlinksw.com

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

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

www.tiot.jp/riak-docs/riak/kv/latest

docs.openlinksw.com/virtuoso

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Microsoft

OpenSource, formerly Basho Technologies

OpenLink Software

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

1989

2009

1998

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

3.2.0, December 2022

7.2.11, September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache version 2, commercial enterprise edition

Open Source

GPLv2, extended commercial license available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Implementation language

C and C++

C++

Erlang

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux
Windows

Linux
OS X

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

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

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

restricted

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

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

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)

HTTP API
Native Erlang Interface

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

unofficial client library
C#
C++

unofficial client library
Clojure

unofficial client library
Dart

unofficial client library
Erlang
Go

unofficial client library
Groovy

unofficial client library
Haskell

unofficial client library
Java
JavaScript

unofficial client library
Lisp

unofficial client library
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

unofficial client library
Smalltalk

unofficial client library

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

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

Erlang

yes

Virtuoso PL

Triggers

yes

pre-commit hooks and post-commit hooks

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

no "single point of failure"

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

selectable replication factor

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

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

links between data sets can be stored

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

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes, using Riak Security

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

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Market metrics

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Licensing and pricing models

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