DBMS > Derby vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. NSDb

System Properties Comparison Derby vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. NSDb

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Full-featured RDBMS with a small footprint, either embedded into a Java application or used as a database server.

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.)

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Scalable, High-performance Time Series DBMS designed for Real-time Analytics on top of Kubernetes

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	4.60
Rank	#70	Overall
	#38	Relational DBMS

Score	101.16
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	821.56
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	0.08
Rank	#369	Overall
	#40	Time Series DBMS

Website

db.apache.org/derby

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

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

nsdb.io

Technical documentation

db.apache.org/derby/manuals/index.html

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

nsdb.io/Architecture

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Microsoft

Initial release

1997

1992

1989

2017

Current release

10.17.1.0, November 2023

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

Java

C++

Java, Scala

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

Linux
Windows

Linux
macOS

Data scheme

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes: int, bigint, decimal, string

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

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

yes

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

JDBC

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

gRPC
HTTP REST
WebSocket

Supported programming languages

Java

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

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

Java
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Java Stored Procedures

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

none

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual 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

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

but no files for transaction logging

yes

Using Apache Lucene

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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