DBMS > FileMaker vs. Microsoft Access vs. searchxml vs. Snowflake vs. Spark SQL

System Properties Comparison FileMaker vs. Microsoft Access vs. searchxml vs. Snowflake vs. Spark SQL

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.)

DBMS for structured and unstructured content wrapped with an application server

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Spark SQL is a component on top of 'Spark Core' for structured data processing

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Native XML DBMS
Search engine

Relational DBMS

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

Score	47.91
Rank	#20	Overall
	#14	Relational DBMS

Score	101.16
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	0.03
Rank	#390	Overall
	#7	Native XML DBMS
	#24	Search engines

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	18.04
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Website

www.claris.com/filemaker

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

www.searchxml.net/category/products

www.snowflake.com

spark.apache.org/sql

Technical documentation

www.claris.com/resources/documentation

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

www.searchxml.net/support/handouts

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

spark.apache.org/docs/latest/sql-programming-guide.html

Developer

Claris

a subsidiary of Apple

Microsoft

informationpartners gmbh

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Apache Software Foundation

Initial release

1983

1992

2015

2014

Current release

19.4.1, November 2021

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

1.0

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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++

Scala

Server operating systems

iOS

client part only
Linux
OS X
Windows

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

Windows

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

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

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

APIs and other access methods

Filemaker WebDirect
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

RESTful HTTP API
WebDAV
XQuery
XSLT

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

PHP

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

C++

most other programming languages supported via APIs

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Java
Python
R
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

on the application server

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

yes

yes, utilizing Spark Core

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication, warm standby

since Version 14

none

yes

sychronisation to multiple collections

yes

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

multiple readers, single writer

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

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.

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

Domain, group and role-based access control at the document level and for application services

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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