DBMS > IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Realm vs. Teradata Aster

System Properties Comparison IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Realm vs. Teradata Aster

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Teradata Aster has been integrated into other Teradata systems and therefore will be removed from the DB-Engines ranking.

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.)

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

A DBMS built for use on mobile devices that’s a fast, easy to use alternative to SQLite and Core Data

Platform for big data analytics on multistructured data sources and types

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Document store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

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

Score	7.60
Rank	#52	Overall
	#9	Document stores

Website

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

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

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

realm.io

Technical documentation

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

realm.io/docs

Developer

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Microsoft

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

Teradata

Initial release

2010

1992

2014

2005

Current release

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

Open Source

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

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

Android
Backend: server-less
iOS
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

Flexible Schema (defined schema, partial schema, schema free)

defined schema within the relational store; partial schema or schema free in the Aster File Store

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.

yes

in Aster File Store

Secondary indexes

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

SQL-like query language

yes

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB

Supported programming languages

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

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

.Net
Java

with Android only
Objective-C
React Native
Swift

C
C#
C++
Java
Python
R

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

JavaScript

runs within the applications so server-side scripts are unnecessary

R packages

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

JavaScript

yes

Change Listeners

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

yes

Dimension tables are replicated across all nodes in the cluster. The number of replicas for the file store can be configured.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

yes

SQL Map-Reduce Framework

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

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.

yes

In-Memory realm

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

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

yes

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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