DBMS > CouchDB vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. SpaceTime

System Properties Comparison CouchDB vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. SpaceTime

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A native JSON - document store inspired by Lotus Notes, scalable from globally distributed server-clusters down to mobile phones.

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.)

Search-as-a-service for web and mobile app development

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

SpaceTime is a spatio-temporal DBMS with a focus on performance.

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Spatial DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	9.30
Rank	#45	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	5.59
Rank	#63	Overall
	#7	Search engines

Score	29.04
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#7	Spatial DBMS

Website

couchdb.apache.org

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

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/search

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

www.mireo.com/spacetime

Technical documentation

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Damien Katz, a former Lotus Notes developer

Microsoft

Mireo

Initial release

2005

1992

2015

2014

2020

Current release

3.3.3, December 2023

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

Erlang

C++

Server operating systems

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

hosted

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

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

via views

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

SQL-like query language

A subset of ANSI SQL is implemented

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

RESTful HTTP API

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

RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

C
C#
ColdFusion
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
Ruby
Smalltalk

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

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

C#
C++
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

JavaScript

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

JavaScript

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Fixed-grid hypercubes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Real-time block device replication (DRBD)

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Immediate 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 single document possible

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

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.

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per database

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

yes

using Azure authentication

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

yes

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