DBMS > Firebird vs. Oracle vs. RDF4J vs. Sphinx vs. TypeDB

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. Oracle vs. RDF4J vs. Sphinx vs. TypeDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Widely used RDBMS

RDF4J is a Java framework for processing RDF data, supporting both memory-based and a disk-based storage.

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

TypeDB is a strongly-typed database with a rich and logical type system and TypeQL as its query language

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

RDF store

Search engine

Graph DBMS
Relational DBMS

Often described as a 'hyper-relational' database, since it implements the 'Entity-Relationship Paradigm' to manage complex data structures and ontologies.

Secondary database models

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	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	1236.29
Rank	#1	Overall
	#1	Relational DBMS

Score	0.69
Rank	#230	Overall
	#9	RDF stores

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	0.65
Rank	#234	Overall
	#20	Graph DBMS
	#107	Relational DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

www.oracle.com/database

rdf4j.org

sphinxsearch.com

typedb.com

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

docs.oracle.com/en/database

rdf4j.org/documentation

sphinxsearch.com/docs

typedb.com/docs

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Oracle

Since 2016 officially forked into an Eclipse project, former developer was Aduna Software.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Vaticle

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

1980

2004

2001

2016

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

23c, September 2023

3.5.1, February 2023

2.26.3, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Eclipse Distribution License (EDL), v1.0.

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

GPL Version 3, commercial licenses 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++

Java

C++

Java

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

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

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

Schemaless in JSON and XML columns

yes

RDF Schemas

yes

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

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

with proprietary extensions

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

JDBC
ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

Java API
RIO

RDF Input/Output
Sail API
SeRQL

Sesame RDF Query Language
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL

Proprietary protocol

gRPC protocol
TypeDB Console (shell)
TypeDB Studio (Visualisation software- previously TypeDB Workbase)

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

Java
PHP
Python

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

All JVM based languages
Groovy
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

PL/SQL

also stored procedures in Java possible

yes

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

none

Sharding

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

Sharding

by using Cassandra

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

Multi-source replication

by using Cassandra

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

can be realized in PL/SQL

yes

by using Apache Kafka and Apache Zookeeper

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

substituted by the relationship feature

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

isolation level can be parameterized

ACID

Isolation support depends on the API used

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 storage is supported as well

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

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

yes

at REST API level; other APIs in progress

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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Competitive advantages

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Typical application scenarios

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Licensing and pricing models

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