DBMS > Google Cloud Spanner vs. IBM Db2 warehouse vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Oracle

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Spanner vs. IBM Db2 warehouse vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Oracle

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.

Cloud-based data warehousing service

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.)

Search-as-a-service for web and mobile app development

Widely used RDBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
RDF store

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
Spatial DBMS

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
Vector DBMS

since Oracle 23

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

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	1.30
Rank	#164	Overall
	#75	Relational DBMS

Score	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	5.59
Rank	#63	Overall
	#7	Search engines

Score	1236.29
Rank	#1	Overall
	#1	Relational DBMS

Website

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.ibm.com/products/db2/warehouse

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

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/search

www.oracle.com/database

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search

docs.oracle.com/en/database

Developer

Google

IBM

Microsoft

Oracle

Initial release

2017

2014

1992

2015

1980

Current release

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

23c, September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

restricted free version is available

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++

C and C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

hosted

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows
z/OS

Data scheme

yes

Schemaless in JSON and XML columns

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.

Import/export of XML data possible

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

yes

with proprietary extensions

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

.NET Client API
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby

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

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

C
C#
C++
Clojure
Cobol
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Fortran
Groovy
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Objective C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Tcl
Visual Basic

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PL/SQL, SQL PL

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

PL/SQL

also stored procedures in Java possible

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

yes

none

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

can be realized in PL/SQL

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

isolation level can be parameterized

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.

yes

Version 12c introduced the new option 'Oracle Database In-Memory'

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

yes

using Azure authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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