DBMS > Citus vs. dBASE vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft SQL Server

System Properties Comparison Citus vs. dBASE vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft SQL Server

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Scalable hybrid operational and analytics RDBMS for big data use cases based on PostgreSQL

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.

Cloud-hosted realtime document store. iOS, Android, and JavaScript clients share one Realtime Database instance and automatically receive updates with the newest data.

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.)

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.21
Rank	#118	Overall
	#56	Relational DBMS

Score	10.34
Rank	#44	Overall
	#28	Relational DBMS

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Website

www.citusdata.com

www.dbase.com

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

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

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

Technical documentation

docs.citusdata.com

www.dbase.com/support/knowledgebase

firebase.google.com/docs/database

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

Developer

Asthon Tate

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Microsoft

Initial release

2010

1979

2012

1992

1989

Current release

8.1, December 2018

dBASE 2019, 2019

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

restricted free version is available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C++

Server operating systems

Linux

DOS

dBase Classic
Windows

dBase Pro

hosted

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

Linux
Windows

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

specific XML type available, but no XML query functionality

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

standard, with numerous extensions

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

yes

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

none

The IDE can access other DBMS or ODBC-sources.

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

dBase proprietary IDE

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

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

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

The IDE can access stored procedures in other database systems.

limited functionality with using 'rules'

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

Triggers

yes

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

none

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

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

yes

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

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

Access rights for users and roles

yes, based on authentication and database rules

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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