DBMS > AlaSQL vs. Cassandra vs. dBASE vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Microsoft Access

System Properties Comparison AlaSQL vs. Cassandra vs. dBASE vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Microsoft Access

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

JavaScript DBMS library

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

dBase was one of the first databases with a development environment on PC's. Its latest version dBase V is still sold as dBase classic, which needs a DOS Emulation. The up-to-date product is dBase plus.

A high performance, column-oriented RDBMS, specifically developed to harness the massive parallelism of modern CPU and GPU hardware

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

Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	0.51
Rank	#256	Overall
	#40	Document stores
	#118	Relational DBMS

Score	98.83
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	9.70
Rank	#44	Overall
	#28	Relational DBMS

Score	1.64
Rank	#145	Overall
	#67	Relational DBMS

Score	101.16
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Website

alasql.org

cassandra.apache.org

www.dbase.com

github.com/heavyai/heavydb
www.heavy.ai

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

Technical documentation

github.com/AlaSQL/alasql

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

www.dbase.com/support/knowledgebase

docs.heavy.ai

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

Developer

Andrey Gershun & Mathias R. Wulff

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Asthon Tate

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

Microsoft

Initial release

2014

2008

1979

2016

1992

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

dBASE 2019, 2019

5.10, January 2022

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

MIT-License

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

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.

Astra DB: Multi-cloud DBaaS built on Apache Cassandra.

Implementation language

JavaScript

Java

C++ and CUDA

C++

Server operating systems

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

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

DOS

dBase Classic
Windows

dBase Pro

Linux

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

Data scheme

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

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

SQL-like SELECT, DML and DDL statements (CQL)

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

APIs and other access methods

JavaScript API

Proprietary protocol

CQL (Cassandra Query Language, an SQL-like language)
Thrift

none

The IDE can access other DBMS or ODBC-sources.

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

Supported programming languages

JavaScript

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

dBase proprietary IDE

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

The IDE can access stored procedures in other database systems.

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

no "single point of failure"

none

Sharding

Round robin

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

none

Multi-source replication

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

none

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

only for local storage and DOM-storage

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

not for dBase internal data, but IDE does support transactions when accessing external DBMS

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

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

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Access rights for users and roles

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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Market metrics

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Licensing and pricing models

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