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

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

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

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

Popular in-memory data platform used as a cache, message broker, and database that can be deployed on-premises, across clouds, and hybrid environments

Redis focuses on performance so most of its design decisions prioritize high performance and very low latencies.

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

Key-value store

Multiple data types and a rich set of operations, as well as configurable data expiration, eviction and persistence

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

with RedisJSON
Graph DBMS

with RedisGraph
Spatial DBMS
Search engine

with RediSearch
Time Series DBMS

with RedisTimeSeries
Vector DBMS

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

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	0.69
Rank	#230	Overall
	#9	RDF stores

Score	157.80
Rank	#6	Overall
	#1	Key-value stores

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

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

Website

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

rdf4j.org/documentation

docs.redis.com/latest/index.html
redis.io/docs

sphinxsearch.com/docs

typedb.com/docs

Developer

Firebird Foundation

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

Redis project core team, inspired by Salvatore Sanfilippo

Development sponsored by Redis Inc.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Vaticle

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2004

2009

2001

2016

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

7.2.4, January 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

2.26.3, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

Eclipse Distribution License (EDL), v1.0.

Open Source

source-available extensions (modules), commercial licenses for Redis Enterprise

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.

Aiven for Redis: Fully managed in-memory key-value store for all your caching and speedy lookup needs.

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

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

ported and maintained by Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

RDF Schemas

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

partial

Supported data types are strings, hashes, lists, sets and sorted sets, bit arrays, hyperloglogs and geospatial indexes

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

with RediSearch module

yes

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

with RediSQL module

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

Java API
RIO

RDF Input/Output
Sail API
SeRQL

Sesame RDF Query Language
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL

proprietary protocol

RESP - REdis Serialization Protocol

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

Java
PHP
Python

C
C#
C++
Clojure
Crystal
D
Dart
Elixir
Erlang
Fancy
Go
Haskell
Haxe
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Pascal
Perl
PHP
Prolog
Pure Data
Python
R
Rebol
Ruby
Rust
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Swift
Tcl
Visual Basic

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

yes

Lua; Redis Functions coming in Redis 7 (slides and Github)

Triggers

yes

publish/subscribe channels provide some trigger functionality; RedisGears

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Automatic hash-based sharding with support for hash-tags for manual sharding

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

none

Multi-source replication

with Redis Enterprise Pack
Source-replica replication

Chained replication is supported

none

Multi-source replication

by using Cassandra

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

through RedisGears

yes

by using Apache Kafka and Apache Zookeeper

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Causal consistency can be enabled in Active-Active databases
Strong consistency with Redis Raft
Strong eventual consistency with Active-Active

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 support depends on the API used

Atomic execution of command blocks and scripts and optimistic locking

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

in-memory storage is supported as well

yes

Configurable mechanisms for persistency via snapshots and/or operations logs

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

Access Control Lists (ACLs): redis.io/docs/management/security/acl
LDAP and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) for Redis Enterprise
Mutual TLS authentication: redis.io/docs/management/security/encryption
Password-based authentication

yes

at REST API level; other APIs in progress

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