DBMS > Amazon Aurora vs. Couchbase vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Microsoft Access

System Properties Comparison Amazon Aurora vs. Couchbase vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Microsoft Access

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

MySQL and PostgreSQL compatible cloud service by Amazon

A distributed document store with integrated cache, a powerful search engine, in-built operational and analytical capabilities, and an embedded mobile database

A horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service. It is the externalization of the core Google database that runs the biggest aspects of Google, like Ads and Google Play.

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

Relational DBMS

Document store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

Key-value store

originating from the former Membase product and supporting the Memcached protocol
Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

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

Score	7.84
Rank	#44	Overall
	#28	Relational DBMS

Score	16.74
Rank	#33	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	2.69
Rank	#101	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Score	93.76
Rank	#12	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora

www.couchbase.com

cloud.google.com/spanner

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

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/CHAP_Aurora.html

docs.couchbase.com

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

Developer

Amazon

Couchbase, Inc.

Google

Microsoft

Initial release

2015

2011

2017

1992

Current release

Server: 7.2, June 2023; Mobile: 3.1, March 2022; Couchbase Capella (DBaaS), June 2023

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Business Source License (BSL 1.1); Commercial licenses also available

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

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, C++, Go and Erlang

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

Data scheme

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL++, extends ANSI SQL to JSON for operational, transactional, and analytic use cases

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

CLI Client
HTTP REST
Kafka Connector
Native language bindings for CRUD, Query, Search and Analytics APIs
Spark Connector
Spring Data

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

Supported programming languages

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

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Functions and timers in JavaScript and UDFs in Java, Python, SQL++

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

horizontal partitioning

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

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

Ephemeral buckets

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

User and Administrator separation with password-based and LDAP integrated Authentication. Role-base access control.

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

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

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