DBMS > Google Cloud Spanner vs. Microsoft Access vs. MongoDB vs. NCache vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Spanner vs. Microsoft Access vs. MongoDB vs. NCache vs. Sphinx

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.

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.)

One of the most popular document stores available both as a fully managed cloud service and for deployment on self-managed infrastructure

Open-Source and Enterprise in-memory Key-Value Store

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

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS
Search engine

integrated Lucene index, currently in MongoDB Atlas only.
Time Series DBMS

Time Series Collections introduced in Release 5.0
Vector DBMS

currently available in the MongoDB Atlas cloud service only

Document store
Search engine

Using distributed Lucene

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

Score	2.70
Rank	#100	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Score	91.31
Rank	#12	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	400.93
Rank	#5	Overall
	#1	Document stores

Score	0.94
Rank	#190	Overall
	#28	Key-value stores

Score	5.92
Rank	#57	Overall
	#6	Search engines

Website

cloud.google.com/spanner

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

www.mongodb.com

www.alachisoft.com/ncache

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

www.mongodb.com/docs/manual

www.alachisoft.com/resources/docs

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Google

Microsoft

MongoDB, Inc

Alachisoft

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2017

1992

2009

2005

2001

Current release

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

7.0.5, January 2024

5.3.3, April 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

Open Source

MongoDB Inc.'s Server Side Public License v1. Prior versions were published under GNU AGPL v3.0. Commercial licenses are also available.

Open Source

Enterprise Edition available

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

MongoDB available as DBaaS (MongoDB Atlas)

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C++

C#, .NET, .NET Core, Java

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Although schema-free, documents of the same collection often follow the same structure. Optionally impose all or part of a schema by defining a JSON schema.

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, integer, double, decimal, boolean, date, object_id, geospatial

partial

Supported data types are Lists, Queues, Hashsets, Dictionary and Counter

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

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

Read-only SQL queries via the MongoDB Atlas SQL Interface

SQL-like query syntax and LINQ for searching the cache. Cache Synchronization with SQL Server using SQL dependency.

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

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

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

GraphQL
HTTP REST
Prisma
proprietary protocol using JSON

IDistributedCache
JCache
LINQ
Proprietary native API

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

Actionscript

unofficial driver
C
C#
C++
Clojure

unofficial driver
ColdFusion

unofficial driver
D

unofficial driver
Dart

unofficial driver
Delphi

unofficial driver
Erlang
Go
Groovy

unofficial driver
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Kotlin
Lisp

unofficial driver
Lua

unofficial driver
MatLab

unofficial driver
Perl
PHP
PowerShell

unofficial driver
Prolog

unofficial driver
Python
R

unofficial driver
Ruby
Rust
Scala
Smalltalk

unofficial driver
Swift

.Net
.Net Core
C#
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Scala

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

JavaScript

support for stored procedures with SQL-Server CLR

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

in MongoDB Atlas only

yes

Notifications

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

Partitioned by hashed, ranged, or zoned sharding keys. Live resharding allows users to change their shard keys as an online operation with zero downtime.

yes

Sharding

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

none

Multi-Source deployments with MongoDB Atlas Global Clusters
Source-replica replication

yes, with selectable consistency level

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

can be individually decided for each read operation
Immediate Consistency

default behaviour

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Strong Eventual Consistency over WAN with Conflict Resolution using Bridge Topology

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

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

yes

typically not used, however similar functionality with DBRef possible

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

Multi-document ACID Transactions with snapshot isolation

optimistic locking and pessimistic locking

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

but no files for transaction logging

yes

optional, enabled by default

yes

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

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

In-memory storage engine introduced with MongoDB version 3.2

yes

User concepts

Access control

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

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

Access rights for users and roles

Authentication to access the cache via Active Directory/LDAP (possible roles: user, administrator)

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

MongoDB provides an integrated suite of cloud database and data services to accelerate...
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NCache has been the market leader in .NET Distributed Caching since 2005 . NCache...
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Competitive advantages

Built around the flexible document data model and unified API, MongoDB is a developer...
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NCache is 100% .NET/ .NET Core based which fully supports ASP.NET Core Sessions ,...
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Typical application scenarios

AI-enriched intelligent apps (Continental, Telefonica, Iron Mountain) Internet of...
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NCache enables industries like retail, finance, banking IoT, travel, ecommerce, healthcare...
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Key customers

ADP, Adobe, Amadeus, AstraZeneca, Auto Trader, Barclays, BBVA, Bosch, Cisco, CERN,...
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Bank of America, Citi, Natures Way, Charter Spectrum, Barclays, Henry Schein, GBM,...
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Market metrics

Hundreds of millions downloads, over 150,000+ Atlas clusters provisioned every month...
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Market Leader in .NET Distributed Caching since 2005.
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Licensing and pricing models

MongoDB database server: Server-Side Public License (SSPL) . Commercial licenses...
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NCache Open Source is free on an as-is basis without any support. NCache Enterprise...
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