DBMS > dBASE vs. Ehcache vs. Microsoft Access vs. SQLite vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison dBASE vs. Ehcache vs. Microsoft Access vs. SQLite vs. TimescaleDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

dBase was one of the first databases with a development environment on PC's. Its latest version dBase V is still sold as dBase classic, which needs a DOS Emulation. The up-to-date product is dBase plus.

A widely adopted Java cache with tiered storage options

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.)

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Relational DBMS

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Trend Chart

Score	10.34
Rank	#44	Overall
	#28	Relational DBMS

Score	4.89
Rank	#67	Overall
	#8	Key-value stores

Score	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	114.32
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Score	4.64
Rank	#71	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Website

www.dbase.com

www.ehcache.org

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

www.sqlite.org

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

www.dbase.com/support/knowledgebase

www.ehcache.org/documentation

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Asthon Tate

Terracotta Inc, owned by Software AG

Microsoft

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Timescale

Initial release

1979

2009

1992

2000

2017

Current release

dBASE 2019, 2019

3.10.0, March 2022

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

3.45.3 (15 April 2024), April 2024

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2; commercial licenses available

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

Open Source

Public Domain

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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

Java

C++

Server operating systems

DOS

dBase Classic
Windows

dBase Pro

All OS with a Java VM

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

server-less

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

dynamic column types

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

none

The IDE can access other DBMS or ODBC-sources.

JCache

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

dBase proprietary IDE

Java

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

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

The IDE can access stored procedures in other database systems.

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

Cache Event Listeners

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

by using Terracotta Server

none

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

yes

by using Terracotta Server

none

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Tunable Consistency (Strong, Eventual, Weak)

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

not for dBase internal data, but IDE does support transactions when accessing external DBMS

yes

supports JTA and can work as an XA resource

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

via file-system locks

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

using a tiered cache-storage approach

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

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users and roles

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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