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

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

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

JavaScript DBMS library

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

MySQL application compatible open source RDBMS, enhanced with high availability, security, interoperability and performance capabilities. MariaDB ColumnStore provides a column-oriented storage engine and MariaDB Xpand supports distributed SQL.

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

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

with OQGraph storage engine
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	0.42
Rank	#264	Overall
	#42	Document stores
	#122	Relational DBMS

Score	9.16
Rank	#43	Overall
	#27	Relational DBMS

Score	1.41
Rank	#153	Overall
	#71	Relational DBMS

Score	83.44
Rank	#15	Overall
	#10	Relational DBMS

Score	93.76
Rank	#12	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Website

alasql.org

www.dbase.com

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

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

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

Technical documentation

github.com/AlaSQL/alasql

www.dbase.com/support/knowledgebase

docs.heavy.ai

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

Developer

Andrey Gershun & Mathias R. Wulff

Asthon Tate

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

MariaDB Corporation Ab (MariaDB Enterprise),
MariaDB Foundation (community MariaDB Server)

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

Microsoft

Initial release

2014

1979

2016

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

1992

Current release

dBASE 2019, 2019

5.10, January 2022

11.5.2, August 2024

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

MIT-License

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription 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.

STACKIT MariaDB offers MariaDB in a fully managed version in enterprise grade, 100% GDPR-compliant.

Implementation language

JavaScript

C++ and CUDA

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

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

DOS

dBase Classic
Windows

dBase Pro

Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

APIs and other access methods

JavaScript API

none

The IDE can access other DBMS or ODBC-sources.

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

Supported programming languages

JavaScript

dBase proprietary IDE

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

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

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

PL/SQL compatibility added with version 10.3

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

Round robin

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

Multi-source replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

none

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

only for local storage and DOM-storage

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

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

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

not for in-memory storage engine

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

with MEMORY storage engine

User concepts

Access control

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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Typical application scenarios

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Key customers

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Market metrics

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Licensing and pricing models

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