DBMS > Citus vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. MariaDB vs. Microsoft Access

System Properties Comparison Citus vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. MariaDB vs. Microsoft Access

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

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.

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.)

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

Document store
Graph DBMS

with OQGraph storage engine
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.15
Rank	#117	Overall
	#56	Relational DBMS

Score	2.84
Rank	#100	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Score	91.04
Rank	#13	Overall
	#9	Relational DBMS

Score	101.16
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Website

www.citusdata.com

cloud.google.com/spanner

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

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

Technical documentation

docs.citusdata.com

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

Developer

Google

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

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

Microsoft

Initial release

2010

2017

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

1992

Current release

8.1, December 2018

11.3.2, February 2024

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription 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.

STACKIT MariaDB offers MariaDB in a fully managed version in enterprise grade, 100% GDPR-compliant.

Implementation language

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

Linux

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

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

specific XML type available, but no XML query functionality

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

standard, with numerous extensions

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

APIs and other access methods

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

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
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

Supported programming languages

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

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

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

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

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

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

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

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

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

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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Competitive advantages

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Typical application scenarios

Web, SaaS and Cloud operational applications that require high availability, scalability...
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Key customers

Deutsche Bank, DBS Bank, Nasdaq, Red Hat, ServiceNow, Verizon and Walgreens Featured...
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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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Licensing and pricing models

MariaDB plc subscriptions cover our free, open source database, Community Server,...
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