DBMS > FoundationDB vs. Microsoft Access vs. PouchDB vs. Sphinx vs. SQLite

System Properties Comparison FoundationDB vs. Microsoft Access vs. PouchDB vs. Sphinx vs. SQLite

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market. As a consequence, the product was removed from the DB-Engines ranking. In April 2018, Apple open-sourced FoundationDB and it therefore reappears in the ranking.

Description

Ordered key-value store. Core features are complimented by layers.

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

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

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

Primary database model

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

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

Score	1.06
Rank	#185	Overall
	#31	Document stores
	#28	Key-value stores
	#85	Relational DBMS

Score	101.16
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	2.34
Rank	#112	Overall
	#21	Document stores

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	111.41
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Website

github.com/apple/foundationdb

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

pouchdb.com

sphinxsearch.com

www.sqlite.org

Technical documentation

apple.github.io/foundationdb

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

pouchdb.com/guides

sphinxsearch.com/docs

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

Developer

FoundationDB

Microsoft

Apache Software Foundation

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Initial release

2013

1992

2012

2001

2000

Current release

6.2.28, November 2020

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

7.1.1, June 2019

3.5.1, February 2023

3.46.0 (23 May 2024), May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

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++

JavaScript

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

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

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

server-less

Data scheme

schema-free

some layers support schemas

yes

schema-free

yes

dynamic column types

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

some layers support typing

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

via views

yes

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

supported in specific SQL layer only

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

HTTP REST

only for PouchDB Server
JavaScript API

Proprietary protocol

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

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

JavaScript

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

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

in SQL-layer only

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

View functions in JavaScript

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

with a proxy-based framework, named couchdb-lounge

Sharding

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

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

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

Linearizable consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

in SQL-layer only

yes

Transaction concepts

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

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

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

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

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

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