DBMS > FileMaker vs. Interbase vs. Microsoft Access vs. Oracle Rdb vs. SQLite

System Properties Comparison FileMaker vs. Interbase vs. Microsoft Access vs. Oracle Rdb vs. SQLite

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Light-weight proven RDBMS

originally from Borland

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

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

Score	48.20
Rank	#20	Overall
	#14	Relational DBMS

Score	4.61
Rank	#72	Overall
	#39	Relational DBMS

Score	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	1.08
Rank	#184	Overall
	#85	Relational DBMS

Score	114.32
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Website

www.claris.com/filemaker

www.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

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

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/rdb.html

www.sqlite.org

Technical documentation

www.claris.com/resources/documentation

docs.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/rdb-doc.html

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

Developer

Claris

a subsidiary of Apple

Embarcadero

Microsoft

Oracle, originally developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Initial release

1983

1984

1992

1984

2000

Current release

19.4.1, November 2021

InterBase 2020, December 2019

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

7.4.1.1, 2021

3.45.3 (15 April 2024), April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

Open Source

Public Domain

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++

Server operating systems

iOS

client part only
Linux
OS X
Windows

Android
iOS
Linux
OS X
Windows

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

HP Open VMS

server-less

Data scheme

yes

Flexible Schema (defined schema, partial schema, 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

export as XML data possible

Secondary indexes

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

Supported programming languages

PHP

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java
Object Pascal
PHP
Ruby

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Interbase procedure and trigger language

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication, warm standby

since Version 14

Interbase Change Views

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

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

yes, on a single node

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Multiversion concurreny control

yes

via file-system locks

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

User concepts

Access control

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

More information provided by the system vendor

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.