DBMS > AlaSQL vs. Amazon Redshift vs. Amazon SimpleDB vs. CouchDB vs. Microsoft Access

System Properties Comparison AlaSQL vs. Amazon Redshift vs. Amazon SimpleDB vs. CouchDB vs. Microsoft Access

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

JavaScript DBMS library

Large scale data warehouse service for use with business intelligence tools

Hosted simple database service by Amazon, with the data stored in the Amazon Cloud.

There is an unrelated product called SimpleDB developed by Edward Sciore

A native JSON - document store inspired by Lotus Notes, scalable from globally distributed server-clusters down to mobile phones.

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.)

Primary database model

Document store
Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

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Trend Chart

Score	0.46
Rank	#260	Overall
	#40	Document stores
	#121	Relational DBMS

Score	17.94
Rank	#34	Overall
	#21	Relational DBMS

Score	1.85
Rank	#138	Overall
	#24	Key-value stores

Score	9.30
Rank	#45	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Website

alasql.org

aws.amazon.com/redshift

aws.amazon.com/simpledb

couchdb.apache.org

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

Technical documentation

github.com/AlaSQL/alasql

docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift

docs.aws.amazon.com/simpledb

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

Developer

Andrey Gershun & Mathias R. Wulff

Amazon (based on PostgreSQL)

Amazon

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Damien Katz, a former Lotus Notes developer

Microsoft

Initial release

2014

2012

2007

2005

1992

Current release

3.3.3, December 2023

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

MIT-License

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

JavaScript

Erlang

C++

Server operating systems

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

hosted

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

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.

Secondary indexes

restricted

yes

All columns are indexed automatically

yes

via views

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to SQL99, but no user access control, stored procedures and host language bindings.

yes

does not fully support an SQL-standard

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

APIs and other access methods

JavaScript API

JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

Supported programming languages

JavaScript

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

.Net
C
C++
Erlang
Java
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C
C#
ColdFusion
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
Ruby
Smalltalk

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

in Python

View functions in JavaScript

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

none

Sharding must be implemented in the application

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

none

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

informational only, not enforced by the system

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

only for local storage and DOM-storage

ACID

Concurrent data updates can be detected by the application

atomic operations within a single document possible

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using IndexedDB, SQL.JS or proprietary FileStorage

yes

but no files for transaction logging

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights for users and roles can be defined via the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Access rights for users can be defined per database

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

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