DBMS > dBASE vs. H2 vs. Microsoft Access vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison dBASE vs. H2 vs. Microsoft Access vs. Snowflake

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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.)

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	9.70
Rank	#44	Overall
	#28	Relational DBMS

Score	8.33
Rank	#46	Overall
	#30	Relational DBMS

Score	101.16
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

www.dbase.com

www.h2database.com

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

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

www.dbase.com/support/knowledgebase

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Asthon Tate

Thomas Mueller

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

1979

2005

1992

2014

Current release

dBASE 2019, 2019

2.2.220, July 2023

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

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

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

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

DOS

dBase Classic
Windows

dBase Pro

All OS with a Java VM

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

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

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

yes

APIs and other access methods

none

The IDE can access other DBMS or ODBC-sources.

JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

dBase proprietary IDE

Java

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

yes

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

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

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

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

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

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