DBMS > FileMaker vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Microsoft Access vs. PouchDB vs. SQLite

System Properties Comparison FileMaker vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Microsoft Access vs. PouchDB vs. SQLite

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Cloud-hosted realtime document store. iOS, Android, and JavaScript clients share one Realtime Database instance and automatically receive updates with the newest data.

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.)

JavaScript DBMS with an API inspired by CouchDB

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

Primary database model

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

Score	48.20
Rank	#20	Overall
	#14	Relational DBMS

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	2.28
Rank	#115	Overall
	#21	Document stores

Score	114.32
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Website

www.claris.com/filemaker

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

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

pouchdb.com

www.sqlite.org

Technical documentation

www.claris.com/resources/documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/database

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

pouchdb.com/guides

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

Developer

Claris

a subsidiary of Apple

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Microsoft

Apache Software Foundation

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Initial release

1983

2012

1992

2012

2000

Current release

19.4.1, November 2021

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

7.1.1, June 2019

3.45.3 (15 April 2024), April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

Open Source

Public Domain

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

C++

JavaScript

Server operating systems

iOS

client part only
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

server-less

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

dynamic column types

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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

via views

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

via plugins

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

APIs and other access methods

Filemaker WebDirect
JDBC
ODBC

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

HTTP REST

only for PouchDB Server
JavaScript API

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

Supported programming languages

PHP

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

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

JavaScript

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

limited functionality with using 'rules'

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

View functions in JavaScript

Triggers

yes

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

with a proxy-based framework, named couchdb-lounge

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication, warm standby

since Version 14

none

Multi-source replication

also with CouchDB databases
Source-replica replication

also with CouchDB databases

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

via file-system locks

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

but no files for transaction logging

yes

by using IndexedDB, WebSQL or LevelDB as backend

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

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

yes, based on authentication and database rules

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

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