DBMS > H2 vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. Postgres-XL vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison H2 vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. Postgres-XL vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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.)

Database as a Service offering with high compatibility to Microsoft SQL Server

Based on PostgreSQL enhanced with MPP and write-scale-out cluster features

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	8.22
Rank	#50	Overall
	#32	Relational DBMS

Score	105.40
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	78.40
Rank	#15	Overall
	#10	Relational DBMS

Score	0.52
Rank	#256	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Score	123.20
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

www.h2database.com

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

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/azure-sql/database

www.postgres-xl.org

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Thomas Mueller

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2005

1992

2010

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

2014

Current release

2.2.220, July 2023

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

V12

10 R1, October 2018

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

Open Source

Mozilla public license

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

Java

C++

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

hosted

Linux
macOS

hosted

Data scheme

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

XML type, but no XML query functionality

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Java

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

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

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Erlang
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Java Stored Procedures and User-Defined Functions

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

Transact SQL

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

horizontal partitioning

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

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

none

yes, with always 3 replicas available

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

ACID

MVCC

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

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

User concepts

Access control

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

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

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