DBMS > IBM Cloudant vs. Informix vs. InterSystems IRIS vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

System Properties Comparison IBM Cloudant vs. Informix vs. InterSystems IRIS vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

A secure embeddable database from IBM, positioned besides IBM Db2 as a relatively low-cost product optimized for OLTP and Internet of Things data

A containerised multi-model DBMS, interoperability and analytics data platform with wide capabilities for vertical and horizontal scalability

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.)

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

Since Version 12.10 support for JSON/BSON datatypes compatible with MongoDB

Document store
Key-value store
Object oriented DBMS
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

with Informix TimeSeries Extension

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	17.87
Rank	#35	Overall
	#22	Relational DBMS

Score	4.05
Rank	#83	Overall
	#14	Document stores
	#10	Key-value stores
	#1	Object oriented DBMS
	#45	Relational DBMS

Score	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	29.04
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Website

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

www.ibm.com/products/informix

www.intersystems.com/products/intersystems-iris

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

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

Technical documentation

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

informix.hcldoc.com
www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSGU8G/welcomeIfxServers.html

docs.intersystems.com/irislatest/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

Developer

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

IBM, HCL Technologies

Effective May 1st, 2017, HCL took on development, technical support, and product management teams, and works jointly with IBM on product strategy, marketing, and sales.

InterSystems

Microsoft

Initial release

2010

1984

2018

1992

2014

Current release

14.10.FC5, November 2020

2023.3, June 2023

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free developer edition available

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

Erlang

C, C++ and Java

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

AIX
Linux
macOS
Ubuntu
Windows

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

depending on used data model

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Since Version 12.10 support for JSON/BSON datatypes

yes

JSON types

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

All properties auto-indexed by default

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

JDBC
JSON API

MongoDB compatible
MQTT (Message Queue Telemetry Transport)
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

Supported programming languages

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

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

.Net
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

JavaScript

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

JavaScript

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication

none

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

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 can be defined per database

Users with fine-grained authentication, authorization, and auditing controls

yes

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

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

InterSystems IRIS is a complete cloud-first data platform which includes a multi-model...
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