DBMS > Altibase vs. MariaDB vs. Microsoft Access vs. Sphinx vs. TiDB

System Properties Comparison Altibase vs. MariaDB vs. Microsoft Access vs. Sphinx vs. TiDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

An enterprise grade, high-performance RDBMS

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.)

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

TiDB is an open source distributed SQL database that supports Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) workloads. It is MySQL compatible and features horizontal scalability, strong consistency, and high availability.

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS

with OQGraph storage engine
Spatial DBMS

Document store

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

Score	1.02
Rank	#189	Overall
	#88	Relational DBMS

Score	91.04
Rank	#13	Overall
	#9	Relational DBMS

Score	101.16
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	4.25
Rank	#74	Overall
	#40	Relational DBMS

Website

altibase.com

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

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

sphinxsearch.com

pingcap.com

Technical documentation

github.com/ALTIBASE/Documents/tree/master/Manuals

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

sphinxsearch.com/docs

docs.pingcap.com/tidb/stable

Developer

Altibase

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

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

Microsoft

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

PingCAP, Inc.

Initial release

1999

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

1992

2001

2016

Current release

v7.3, 2023, August 2023

11.3.2, February 2024

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

3.5.1, February 2023

8.1.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open source edition discontinued with March 2023

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription available

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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.

TiDB Cloud: Fully-managed TiDB Service. Bring everything great about TiDB to the cloud.

Implementation language

C++

C and C++

C++

Go, Rust

Server operating systems

AIX
HP-UX
Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

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

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

ANSI SQL-92

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

Proprietary protocol

GORM
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
SQLAlchemy

Supported programming languages

C
C++
Java

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

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

stored procedures and stored functions

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

Sharding

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

none

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

horizontal partitioning (by key range)

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

Using Raft consensus algorithm to ensure data replication with strong consistency among multiple replicas.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

with TiSpark Connector

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

full support since version 6.6

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

not for in-memory storage engine

yes

but no files for transaction logging

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

yes

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

Fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

MariaDB is the most powerful open source relational database – modern SQL and JSON...
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TiDB is an advanced open-source, distributed SQL database for modern application...
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Competitive advantages

MariaDB Servers have many features unavailable in other open source relational databases....
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- HORIZONTAL SCALING : TiDB grants total transparency into your data workloads without...
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Typical application scenarios

Web, SaaS and Cloud operational applications that require high availability, scalability...
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TiDB is ideal for transactional applications that require extreme scalability and...
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Key customers

Deutsche Bank, DBS Bank, Nasdaq, Red Hat, ServiceNow, Verizon and Walgreens Featured...
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Block, Pinterest, Catalyst, Bolt, Flipkart, Capcom, Shopee (E-commerce), JD Cloud...
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Market metrics

MariaDB is the default database in the LAMP stack supplied by Red Hat and SUSE Linux,...
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34K+ GitHub stars 5K+ members in TiDB Community Slack 1K+ community contributors...
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Licensing and pricing models

MariaDB plc subscriptions cover our free, open source database, Community Server,...
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TiDB Community : Free open source software (Apache 2.0) TiDB Self-Hosted : Enterprise...
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