DBMS > BigObject vs. dBASE vs. Microsoft Access vs. SQLite vs. TiDB

System Properties Comparison BigObject vs. dBASE vs. Microsoft Access vs. SQLite vs. TiDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Analytic DBMS for real-time computations and queries

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.

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.)

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

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

a hierachical model (tree) can be imposed

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

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Trend Chart

Score	0.13
Rank	#342	Overall
	#150	Relational DBMS

Score	11.18
Rank	#44	Overall
	#28	Relational DBMS

Score	105.40
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	116.01
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Score	4.94
Rank	#72	Overall
	#40	Relational DBMS

Website

bigobject.io

www.dbase.com

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

www.sqlite.org

pingcap.com

Technical documentation

docs.bigobject.io

www.dbase.com/support/knowledgebase

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

docs.pingcap.com/tidb/stable

Developer

BigObject, Inc.

Asthon Tate

Microsoft

Dwayne Richard Hipp

PingCAP, Inc.

Initial release

2015

1979

1992

2000

2016

Current release

dBASE 2019, 2019

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

3.45.2 (12 March 2024), March 2024

7.6.0, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free community edition available

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

Open Source

Public Domain

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.

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

Implementation language

C++

Go, Rust

Server operating systems

Linux

distributed as a docker-image
OS X

distributed as a docker-image (boot2docker)
Windows

distributed as a docker-image (boot2docker)

DOS

dBase Classic
Windows

dBase Pro

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

server-less

Linux

Data scheme

yes

dynamic column types

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

yes

APIs and other access methods

fluentd
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

none

The IDE can access other DBMS or ODBC-sources.

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

GORM
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
SQLAlchemy

Supported programming languages

dBase proprietary IDE

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

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

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

Lua

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

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

horizontal partitioning (by key range)

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

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

none

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

automatically between fact table and dimension tables

yes

full support since version 6.6

Transaction concepts

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

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

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Read/write lock on objects (tables, trees)

yes

via file-system locks

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

Access rights for users and roles

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

TiDB is an advanced open-source, distributed SQL database for modern application...
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Competitive advantages

- HORIZONTAL SCALING : TiDB grants total transparency into your data workloads without...
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Typical application scenarios

TiDB is ideal for transactional applications that require extreme scalability and...
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Key customers

Block, Pinterest, Catalyst, Bolt, Flipkart, Capcom, Shopee (E-commerce), JD Cloud...
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Market metrics

34K+ GitHub stars 5K+ members in TiDB Community Slack 1K+ community contributors...
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Licensing and pricing models

TiDB Community : Free open source software (Apache 2.0) TiDB Self-Hosted : Enterprise...
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