DBMS > Firebird vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Rockset vs. Sphinx vs. SwayDB

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Rockset vs. Sphinx vs. SwayDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

A scalable, reliable search and analytics service in the cloud, built on RocksDB

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

An embeddable, non-blocking, type-safe key-value store for single or multiple disks and in-memory storage

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS
Search engine

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	0.82
Rank	#212	Overall
	#36	Document stores

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	0.04
Rank	#387	Overall
	#61	Key-value stores

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

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

rockset.com

sphinxsearch.com

swaydb.simer.au

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

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

docs.rockset.com

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Microsoft

Rockset

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Simer Plaha

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

1989

2019

2001

2018

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

restricted free version is available

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

GNU Affero GPL V3.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

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Implementation language

C and C++

C++

Scala

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux
Windows

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

dynamic typing

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

ingestion from XML files supported

Secondary indexes

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Read-only SQL queries, including JOINs

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

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 REST

Proprietary protocol

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

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Java
Kotlin
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

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

Automatic sharding

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

yes

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Atomic execution of operations

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

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

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

Access rights for users and organizations can be defined via Rockset console

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