DBMS > IBM Cloudant vs. IBM Db2 vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. RethinkDB

System Properties Comparison IBM Cloudant vs. IBM Db2 vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. RethinkDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Common in IBM host environments, 2 different versions for host and Windows/Linux

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

DBMS for the Web with a mechanism to push updated query results to applications in realtime.

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

Since Version 10.5 support for JSON/BSON documents compatible with MongoDB

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Document store

Secondary database models

Document store
RDF store

in Db2 LUW (Linux, Unix, Windows)
Spatial DBMS

with Db2 Spatial Extender

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.73
Rank	#108	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	127.49
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	105.40
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	29.85
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	2.84
Rank	#106	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Website

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

www.ibm.com/products/db2

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

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

rethinkdb.com

Technical documentation

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

www.ibm.com/docs/en/db2

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

rethinkdb.com/docs

Developer

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

IBM

Microsoft

The Linux Foundation

since July 2017

Initial release

2010

1983

host version

1992

2014

2009

Current release

12.1, October 2016

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

2.4.1, August 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free version is available

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2

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

Erlang

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Windows
z/OS

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

yes

string, binary, float, bool, date, geometry

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

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
JDBC
JSON style queries

MongoDB compatible
ODBC
XQuery

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

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

Supported programming languages

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

C
C#
C++
Cobol
Delphi
Fortran
Java
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Visual Basic

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

community-supported driver
C#

community-supported driver
C++

community-supported driver
Clojure

community-supported driver
Dart

community-supported driver
Erlang

community-supported driver
Go

community-supported driver
Haskell

community-supported driver
Java

official driver
JavaScript (Node.js)

official driver
Lisp

community-supported driver
Lua

community-supported driver
Objective-C

community-supported driver
Perl

community-supported driver
PHP

community-supported driver
Python

official driver
Ruby

official driver
Scala

community-supported driver

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

JavaScript

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

JavaScript

Client-side triggers through changefeeds

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

only with Windows/Unix/Linux Version

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

range based

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

with separate tools (MQ, InfoSphere)

none

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual 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

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

Atomic single-document operations

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

yes

MVCC based

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.

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per database

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

yes

users and table-level permissions

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