DBMS > dBASE vs. Fauna vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison dBASE vs. Fauna vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Sphinx

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.

Fauna provides a web-native interface, with support for GraphQL and custom business logic that integrates seamlessly with the rest of the serverless ecosystem. The underlying globally distributed storage and compute platform is fast, consistent, and reliable, with a modern security infrastructure.

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

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Relational DBMS
Time Series DBMS

Search engine

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Search engine

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	9.70
Rank	#44	Overall
	#28	Relational DBMS

Score	1.55
Rank	#151	Overall
	#26	Document stores
	#14	Graph DBMS
	#71	Relational DBMS
	#13	Time Series DBMS

Score	5.52
Rank	#59	Overall
	#6	Search engines

Score	27.71
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

www.dbase.com

fauna.com

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

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

www.dbase.com/support/knowledgebase

docs.fauna.com

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

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Asthon Tate

Fauna, Inc.

Microsoft

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

1979

2014

2015

2014

2001

Current release

dBASE 2019, 2019

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Implementation language

Scala

C++

Server operating systems

DOS

dBase Classic
Windows

dBase Pro

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON 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.

Secondary indexes

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

none

The IDE can access other DBMS or ODBC-sources.

RESTful HTTP API

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

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

dBase proprietary IDE

C#
Go
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby
Scala
Swift

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

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

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

The IDE can access stored procedures in other database systems.

user defined functions

JavaScript

Triggers

JavaScript

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

horizontal partitioning

consistent hashing

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

Multi-source replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session 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

ACID

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

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 and roles

Identity management, authentication, and access control

yes

using Azure authentication

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

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