DBMS > Firebird vs. Milvus vs. TimescaleDB vs. TimesTen

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. Milvus vs. TimescaleDB vs. TimesTen

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

A DBMS designed for efficient storage of vector data and vector similarity searches

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

In-Memory RDBMS compatible to Oracle

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Relational DBMS

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

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	4.64
Rank	#71	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Score	1.31
Rank	#163	Overall
	#74	Relational DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

milvus.io

www.timescale.com

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

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

docs.timescale.com

docs.oracle.com/database/timesten-18.1

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Timescale

Oracle, TimesTen Performance Software, HP

originally founded in HP Labs it was acquired by Oracle in 2005

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2019

2017

1998

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

2.3.4, January 2024

2.13.0, November 2023

11 Release 2 (11.2.2.8.0)

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

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.

Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Implementation language

C and C++

C++, Go

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux
OS X
Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris SPARC/x86
Windows

Data scheme

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

yes

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

RESTful HTTP API

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

JDBC
ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

C
C++
Java
PL/SQL

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

PL/SQL

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

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

by means of logfiles and checkpoints

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

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Milvus is an open-source and cloud-native vector database built for production-ready...
» more

Competitive advantages

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
» more

Typical application scenarios

RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
» more

Key customers

Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
» more

Market metrics

As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Milvus was released under the open-source Apache License 2.0 in October 2019. Fully-managed...
» more

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.

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More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

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2 June 2023, Matthias Gelbmann

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