DBMS > dBASE vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. SQLite

System Properties Comparison dBASE vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB 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.

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

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

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	2.75
Rank	#104	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Score	101.16
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	27.71
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	111.41
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Website

www.dbase.com

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

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

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

www.sqlite.org

Technical documentation

www.dbase.com/support/knowledgebase

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

Developer

Asthon Tate

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Microsoft

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Initial release

1979

2010

1992

2014

2000

Current release

dBASE 2019, 2019

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

3.46.0 (23 May 2024), May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

Open Source

Public Domain

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++

Server operating systems

DOS

dBase Classic
Windows

dBase Pro

hosted

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

hosted

server-less

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

dynamic column types

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

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

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

SQL-like query language

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

APIs and other access methods

none

The IDE can access other DBMS or ODBC-sources.

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

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

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

Supported programming languages

dBase proprietary IDE

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

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.

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

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

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

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

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

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

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

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

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