DBMS > Altibase vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. SAP SQL Anywhere

System Properties Comparison Altibase vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. SAP SQL Anywhere

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

An enterprise grade, high-performance RDBMS

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.)

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

RDBMS database and synchronization technologies for server, desktop, remote office, and mobile environments

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	1.07
Rank	#186	Overall
	#87	Relational DBMS

Score	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	29.04
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	4.25
Rank	#79	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Website

altibase.com

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

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

www.sap.com/products/technology-platform/sql-anywhere.html

Technical documentation

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

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

help.sap.com/docs/SAP_SQL_Anywhere

Developer

Altibase

Microsoft

SAP

formerly Sybase

Initial release

1999

1992

2014

1992

Current release

v7.3, 2023, August 2023

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

17, July 2015

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open source edition discontinued with March 2023

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Implementation language

C++

Server operating systems

AIX
HP-UX
Linux

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

hosted

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

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

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

ANSI SQL-92

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

SQL-like query language

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

ADO.NET
HTTP API
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C
C++
Java

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

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

stored procedures and stored functions

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

JavaScript

yes, in C/C++, Java, .Net or Perl

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

JavaScript

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

none

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Source-replica replication

Database mirroring

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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