DBMS > Couchbase vs. Firebird vs. Microsoft Access vs. SAP SQL Anywhere

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. Firebird vs. Microsoft Access vs. SAP SQL Anywhere

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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

Firebird is an open source RDBMS forked from Borland's InterBase

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.)

RDBMS database and synchronization technologies for server, desktop, remote office, and mobile environments

Primary database model

Document store

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

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

Score	16.74
Rank	#33	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	19.46
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	93.76
Rank	#12	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	3.50
Rank	#81	Overall
	#44	Relational DBMS

Website

www.couchbase.com

www.firebirdsql.org

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

www.sap.com/products/technology-platform/sql-anywhere.html

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

help.sap.com/docs/SAP_SQL_Anywhere

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Firebird Foundation

Microsoft

SAP

formerly Sybase

Initial release

2011

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

1992

Current release

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

5.0.1, August 2024

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

17, July 2015

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

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

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

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

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

yes

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

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
HTTP API
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

PSQL

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes, in C/C++, Java, .Net or Perl

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication

none

Source-replica replication

Database mirroring

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Features a multi-generational MVCC architecture, readers do not block writers

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

Ephemeral buckets

yes

User concepts

Access control

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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