DBMS > Couchbase vs. Elasticsearch vs. Faircom DB vs. FileMaker vs. Microsoft Access

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. Elasticsearch vs. Faircom DB vs. FileMaker vs. Microsoft Access

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A distributed document store with integrated cache, a powerful search engine, in-built operational and analytical capabilities, and an embedded mobile database

A distributed, RESTful modern search and analytics engine based on Apache Lucene

Elasticsearch lets you perform and combine many types of searches such as structured, unstructured, geo, and metric

Native high-speed multi-model DBMS for relational and key-value store data simultaneously accessible through SQL and NoSQL APIs.

FileMaker is a cross-platform RDBMS that includes a GUI frontend.

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

Document store

Search engine

Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Key-value store

originating from the former Membase product and supporting the Memcached protocol
Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

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

Score	18.46
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	134.78
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	0.24
Rank	#311	Overall
	#44	Key-value stores
	#140	Relational DBMS

Score	49.73
Rank	#20	Overall
	#14	Relational DBMS

Score	105.40
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Website

www.couchbase.com

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

www.faircom.com/products/faircom-db

www.claris.com/filemaker

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

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/index.html

docs.faircom.com/docs/en/UUID-7446ae34-a1a7-c843-c894-d5322e395184.html

www.claris.com/resources/documentation

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Elastic

FairCom Corporation

Claris

a subsidiary of Apple

Microsoft

Initial release

2011

2010

1979

1983

1992

Current release

Server: 7.2, June 2023; Mobile: 3.1, March 2022; Couchbase Capella (DBaaS), June 2023

8.6, January 2023

V12, November 2020

19.4.1, November 2021

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Business Source License (BSL 1.1); Commercial licenses also available

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

Restricted, free version available

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

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.

Implementation language

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Java

ANSI C, C++

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
QNX
SCO
Solaris
VxWorks
Windows

easily portable to other OSs

iOS

client part only
Linux
OS X
Windows

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

Data scheme

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

schema free, schema optional, schema required, partial schema,

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes, ANSI SQL Types, JSON, typed binary structures

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

A http query request can return the data in XML format

Secondary indexes

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL++, extends ANSI SQL to JSON for operational, transactional, and analytic use cases

SQL-like query language

yes, ANSI SQL with proprietary extensions

yes

via plugins

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

APIs and other access methods

CLI Client
HTTP REST
Kafka Connector
Native language bindings for CRUD, Query, Search and Analytics APIs
Spark Connector
Spring Data

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
Direct SQL
JDBC
JPA
ODBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON API
RESTful MQTT/JSON API
RPC

Filemaker WebDirect
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
Groovy
Community Contributed Clients
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js and browser)
PHP
Python
Visual Basic

PHP

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Functions and timers in JavaScript and UDFs in Java, Python, SQL++

yes

.Net, JavaScript, C/C++

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

File partitioning, horizontal partitioning, sharding

Customizable business rules for table partitioning

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

yes

yes, configurable to be parallel or serial, synchronous or asynchronous, uni-directional or bi-directional, ACID-consistent or eventually consistent (with custom conflict resolution).

Source-replica replication, warm standby

since Version 14

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

ES-Hadoop Connector

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Tunable consistency per server, database, table, and transaction

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

tunable from ACID to Eventually Consistent

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Yes, tunable from durable to delayed durability to in-memory

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

Ephemeral buckets

Memcached and Redis integration

yes

User concepts

Access control

User and Administrator separation with password-based and LDAP integrated Authentication. Role-base access control.

Fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard with additional protections for files

simple rights management via user accounts and connection to external directory services

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

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