DBMS > 4D vs. Microsoft Access vs. Milvus vs. MySQL vs. searchxml

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Microsoft Access vs. Milvus vs. MySQL vs. searchxml

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

Microsoft Access combines a backend RDBMS (JET / ACE Engine) with a GUI frontend for data manipulation and queries.

The Access frontend is often used for accessing other datasources (DBMS, Excel, etc.)

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

Widely used open source RDBMS

DBMS for structured and unstructured content wrapped with an application server

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Native XML DBMS
Search engine

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.58
Rank	#108	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	1083.74
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#7	Native XML DBMS
	#25	Search engines

Website

www.4d.com

www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/access

milvus.io

www.mysql.com

www.searchxml.net/category/products

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

dev.mysql.com/doc

www.searchxml.net/support/handouts

Developer

4D, Inc

Microsoft

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

informationpartners gmbh

Initial release

1984

1992

2019

1995

2015

Current release

v20, April 2023

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

2.3.4, January 2024

8.4.0, April 2024

1.0

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

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

Aiven for MySQL: Fully managed MySQL, deployable in the cloud of your choice, with seamless integrations and lightning-fast setup.

Implementation language

C++

C++, Go

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

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

close to SQL 92

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

yes

with proprietary extensions

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

RESTful HTTP API
WebDAV
XQuery
XSLT

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java (JDBC-ODBC)
VBA
Visual Basic.NET

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

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

C++

most other programming languages supported via APIs

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

proprietary syntax

yes

on the application server

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

none

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

sychronisation to multiple collections

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

multiple readers, single writer

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

but no files for transaction logging

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 and groups

a simple user-level security was built in till version Access 2003

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

Domain, group and role-based access control at the document level and for application services

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

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