DBMS > IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Access vs. OpenSearch vs. Rockset vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Access vs. OpenSearch vs. Rockset vs. Sphinx

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.)

A distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine forked from Elasticsearch and based on Apache Lucene

A scalable, reliable search and analytics service in the cloud, built on RocksDB

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS
Search engine

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	16.36
Rank	#37	Overall
	#4	Search engines

Score	0.79
Rank	#211	Overall
	#35	Document stores

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

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

github.com/opensearch-project
opensearch.org

rockset.com

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

opensearch.org/docs/latest

docs.rockset.com

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Microsoft

Amazon Web Services

Rockset

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2010

1992

2021

2019

2001

Current release

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

2.5.0, January 2023

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

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++

Java

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

dynamic typing

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.

ingestion from XML files supported

Secondary indexes

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

SQL-like query language

Read-only SQL queries, including JOINs

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

HTTP REST

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

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

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

Elasticsearch client

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

Automatic sharding

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

yes

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

Eventual 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

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

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

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

Access rights for users and organizations can be defined via Rockset console

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

OpenSearch is a highly scalable and extensible open-source software suite for search,...
» more

Competitive advantages

Distributed as fully open source under Apache License, Version 2.0 (ALv2), OpenSearch...
» more

Typical application scenarios

The OpenSearch platform is used across a broad range of search , analytics, and observability...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

The OpenSearch Project offers open source software licensed under Apache License...
» more

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