DBMS > dBASE vs. H2 vs. Microsoft Access vs. Splice Machine vs. SQLite

System Properties Comparison dBASE vs. H2 vs. Microsoft Access vs. Splice Machine vs. SQLite

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.

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.)

Open-Source SQL RDBMS for Operational and Analytical use cases with native Machine Learning, powered by Hadoop and Spark

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	10.34
Rank	#44	Overall
	#28	Relational DBMS

Score	8.13
Rank	#49	Overall
	#31	Relational DBMS

Score	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	0.54
Rank	#250	Overall
	#114	Relational DBMS

Score	114.32
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Website

www.dbase.com

www.h2database.com

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

splicemachine.com

www.sqlite.org

Technical documentation

www.dbase.com/support/knowledgebase

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

splicemachine.com/how-it-works

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

Developer

Asthon Tate

Thomas Mueller

Microsoft

Splice Machine

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Initial release

1979

2005

1992

2014

2000

Current release

dBASE 2019, 2019

2.2.220, July 2023

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

3.1, March 2021

3.45.3 (15 April 2024), April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

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

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

Open Source

AGPL 3.0, commercial license available

Open Source

Public Domain

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

Java

C++

Java

Server operating systems

DOS

dBase Classic
Windows

dBase Pro

All OS with a Java VM

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

server-less

Data scheme

yes

dynamic column types

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

APIs and other access methods

none

The IDE can access other DBMS or ODBC-sources.

JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

JDBC
Native Spark Datasource
ODBC

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

Supported programming languages

dBase proprietary IDE

Java

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

C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
R
Scala

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

The IDE can access stored procedures in other database systems.

Java Stored Procedures and User-Defined Functions

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

Java

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Shared Nothhing Auto-Sharding, Columnar Partitioning

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

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

none

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Yes, via Full Spark Integration

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

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

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

yes

via file-system locks

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

Access rights for users and roles

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

Access rights for users, groups and roles according to SQL-standard

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