Firebird vs Scylla: What are the differences?
# Introduction
This Markdown code compares the key differences between Firebird and Scylla databases, highlighting the specific distinctions between the two database management systems.
1. **Architecture**: Firebird is a relational database management system (RDBMS) that follows a client-server architecture, where the server is responsible for managing data storage and processing queries. In contrast, Scylla is a distributed NoSQL database that utilizes a shared-nothing architecture, allowing for horizontal scalability and high availability by distributing data across multiple nodes.
2. **Data Model**: Firebird uses a traditional relational data model with support for SQL queries, tables, and relationships, making it suitable for transactional applications that require ACID compliance. On the other hand, Scylla employs a wide-column store data model based on Apache Cassandra, optimized for handling large amounts of data with high throughput and low latency, making it ideal for big data and real-time analytics applications.
3. **Consistency and Availability**: Firebird prioritizes data consistency, ensuring that all reads and writes return the most recent data, which may impact availability in case of network partition or node failure. In contrast, Scylla focuses on high availability by sacrificing strict consistency in favor of eventual consistency, allowing reads to return data that may not be the most recent, providing uninterrupted access to data even during failures.
4. **Indexing**: Firebird supports various traditional indexing methods like B-trees and hash indexes to optimize query performance for relational operations, while also providing full-text search capabilities. On the other hand, Scylla utilizes distributed partitioned secondary indexes (DPSI) to efficiently query data using non-primary keys, enhancing performance in distributed environments at the cost of increased storage requirements.
5. **Language Support**: Firebird primarily supports SQL as its query language, with minimal support for procedural language extensions like stored procedures and triggers using PSQL (Procedural SQL). In contrast, Scylla does not natively support SQL but provides a CQL (Cassandra Query Language) interface for data manipulation, leveraging Apache Cassandra's query language for managing distributed databases efficiently.
6. **Ecosystem and Community**: Firebird has a smaller ecosystem and community compared to Scylla, which benefits from the backing of the Apache Software Foundation and a large open-source community actively contributing to its development and support, providing resources and plugins for various use cases and integrations.
In Summary, the key differences between Firebird and Scylla databases lie in their architecture, data model, consistency, availability, indexing methods, language support, and ecosystem/community size, making each database suitable for different types of applications and environments.