DBMS > dBASE vs. Google Cloud Bigtable vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. Microsoft Access vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison dBASE vs. Google Cloud Bigtable vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. Microsoft Access vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

dBase was one of the first databases with a development environment on PC's. Its latest version dBase V is still sold as dBase classic, which needs a DOS Emulation. The up-to-date product is dBase plus.

Google's NoSQL Big Data database service. It's the same database that powers many core Google services, including Search, Analytics, Maps, and Gmail.

Cloud Firestore is an auto-scaling document database for storing, syncing, and querying data for mobile and web apps. It offers seamless integration with other Firebase and Google Cloud Platform products.

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.)

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store
Wide column store

Document store

Relational DBMS

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

Score	10.34
Rank	#44	Overall
	#28	Relational DBMS

Score	3.26
Rank	#92	Overall
	#13	Key-value stores
	#8	Wide column stores

Score	7.85
Rank	#51	Overall
	#8	Document stores

Score	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

www.dbase.com

cloud.google.com/bigtable

firebase.google.com/products/firestore

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

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

www.dbase.com/support/knowledgebase

cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs

firebase.google.com/docs/firestore

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Asthon Tate

Google

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

1979

2015

2017

1992

2014

Current release

dBASE 2019, 2019

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

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++

Server operating systems

DOS

dBase Classic
Windows

dBase Pro

hosted

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

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

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

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

yes

APIs and other access methods

none

The IDE can access other DBMS or ODBC-sources.

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
HappyBase (Python library)
HBase compatible API (Java)

Android
gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

dBase proprietary IDE

C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Go
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
Python

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

The IDE can access stored procedures in other database systems.

yes, Firebase Rules & Cloud Functions

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

user defined functions

Triggers

yes, with Cloud Functions

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

Sharding

none

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

Internal replication in Colossus, and regional replication between two clusters in different zones

Multi-source replication

none

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Using Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate consistency (for a single cluster), Eventual consistency (for two or more replicated clusters)

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

not for dBase internal data, but IDE does support transactions when accessing external DBMS

Atomic single-row operations

yes

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

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

Access rights for users and roles

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management. Security Rules for 3rd party authentication using Firebase Auth.

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

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

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