DBMS > Google Cloud Spanner vs. H2 vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. NuoDB

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Spanner vs. H2 vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. NuoDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service. It is the externalization of the core Google database that runs the biggest aspects of Google, like Ads and Google Play.

Full-featured RDBMS with a small footprint, either embedded into a Java application or used as a database server.

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

NuoDB is a webscale distributed database that supports SQL and ACID transactions

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	8.13
Rank	#49	Overall
	#31	Relational DBMS

Score	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	0.89
Rank	#198	Overall
	#92	Relational DBMS

Website

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.h2database.com

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

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

www.3ds.com/nuodb-distributed-sql-database

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

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

doc.nuodb.com

Developer

Google

Thomas Mueller

Microsoft

Dassault Systèmes

originally NuoDB, Inc.

Initial release

2017

2005

1992

1989

2013

Current release

2.2.220, July 2023

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

dual-licence (Mozilla public license, Eclipse public license)

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

restricted free version is available

commercial

limited edition free

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

Java

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

All OS with a Java VM

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

Linux
Windows

hosted

Amazon EC2, Windows Azure, SoftLayer
Linux
OS X
Windows

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

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

yes

APIs and other access methods

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Java

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

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Java Stored Procedures and User-Defined Functions

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

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

Java, SQL

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

data is dynamically stored/cached on the nodes where it is read/written

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

With clustering: 2 database servers on different computers operate on identical copies of a database

none

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

yes

Managed transparently by NuoDB

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

ACID

tunable commit protocol

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

yes

MVCC

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

Temporary table

User concepts

Access control

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Standard SQL roles/ privileges, Administrative Users

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