DBMS > FileMaker vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. TiDB vs. Vitess

System Properties Comparison FileMaker vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. TiDB vs. Vitess

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

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

TiDB is an open source distributed SQL database that supports Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) workloads. It is MySQL compatible and features horizontal scalability, strong consistency, and high availability.

Scalable, distributed, cloud-native DBMS, extending MySQL

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Document store

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	48.20
Rank	#20	Overall
	#14	Relational DBMS

Score	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	4.66
Rank	#70	Overall
	#38	Relational DBMS

Score	0.82
Rank	#209	Overall
	#97	Relational DBMS

Website

www.claris.com/filemaker

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

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

pingcap.com

vitess.io

Technical documentation

www.claris.com/resources/documentation

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

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

docs.pingcap.com/tidb/stable

vitess.io/docs

Developer

Claris

a subsidiary of Apple

Microsoft

PingCAP, Inc.

The Linux Foundation, PlanetScale

Initial release

1983

1992

1989

2016

2013

Current release

19.4.1, November 2021

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

8.0.0, March 2024

15.0.2, December 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0, commercial licenses available

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.

TiDB Cloud: Fully-managed TiDB Service. Bring everything great about TiDB to the cloud.

Implementation language

C++

Go, Rust

Server operating systems

iOS

client part only
Linux
OS X
Windows

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

Linux
Windows

Linux

Docker
Linux
macOS

Data scheme

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

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

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

via plugins

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

yes

with proprietary extensions

APIs and other access methods

Filemaker WebDirect
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

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

GORM
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
SQLAlchemy

ADO.NET
JDBC
MySQL protocol
ODBC

Supported programming languages

PHP

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

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

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

yes

proprietary syntax

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

horizontal partitioning (by key range)

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication, warm standby

since Version 14

none

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Using Raft consensus algorithm to ensure data replication with strong consistency among multiple replicas.

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

with TiSpark Connector

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency across shards
Immediate Consistency within a shard

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

full support since version 6.6

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

ACID

ACID at shard level

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

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

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

TiDB is an advanced open-source, distributed SQL database for modern application...
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Competitive advantages

- HORIZONTAL SCALING : TiDB grants total transparency into your data workloads without...
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Typical application scenarios

TiDB is ideal for transactional applications that require extreme scalability and...
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Key customers

Block, Pinterest, Catalyst, Bolt, Flipkart, Capcom, Shopee (E-commerce), JD Cloud...
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Market metrics

34K+ GitHub stars 5K+ members in TiDB Community Slack 1K+ community contributors...
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Licensing and pricing models

TiDB Community : Free open source software (Apache 2.0) TiDB Self-Hosted : Enterprise...
» more

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