DBMS > IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Vertica

System Properties Comparison IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Vertica

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

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.)

Search-as-a-service for web and mobile app development

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Cloud or off-cloud analytical database and query engine for structured and semi-structured streaming and batch data. Machine learning platform with built-in algorithms, data preparation capabilities, and model evaluation and management via SQL or Python.

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Column oriented

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS

Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

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

Score	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	5.59
Rank	#63	Overall
	#7	Search engines

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

Score	10.68
Rank	#43	Overall
	#27	Relational DBMS

Website

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

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

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/search

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

www.vertica.com

Technical documentation

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

vertica.com/documentation

Developer

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Microsoft

OpenText

previously Micro Focus and Hewlett Packard

Initial release

2010

1992

2015

2014

2005

Current release

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

12.0.3, January 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

Limited community edition free

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

on-premises, all major clouds - Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and containers

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

Erlang

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

hosted

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Yes, but also semi-structure/unstructured data storage, and complex hierarchical data (like Parquet) stored and/or queried.

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

No Indexes Required. Different internal optimization strategy, but same functionality included.

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

SQL-like query language

Full 1999 standard plus machine learning, time series and geospatial. Over 650 functions.

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

RESTful HTTP API

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
Kafka Connector
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API
Spark Connector
vSQL

character-based, interactive, front-end utility

Supported programming languages

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

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

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

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

C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
R

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

JavaScript

yes, PostgreSQL PL/pgSQL, with minor differences

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

JavaScript

yes, called Custom Alerts

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

horizontal partitioning, hierarchical partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Multi-source replication

One, or more copies of data replicated across nodes, or object-store used for repository.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Bi-directional Spark integration

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

Immediate 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

ACID

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.

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per database

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

yes

using Azure authentication

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard; supports Kerberos, LDAP, Ident and hash

More information provided by the system vendor

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Licensing and pricing models

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