DBMS > Ingres vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Ingres vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Well established RDBMS

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.)

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	3.80
Rank	#82	Overall
	#44	Relational DBMS

Score	101.16
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	821.56
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

www.actian.com/databases/ingres

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

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

www.snowflake.com

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

docs.actian.com/ingres

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Actian Corporation

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

1974

originally developed at University Berkely in early 1970s

1992

1989

2014

2001

Current release

11.2, May 2022

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

restricted free version is available

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

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Implementation language

C++

Server operating systems

AIX
HP Open VMS
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Windows

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

Linux
Windows

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

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.

but tools for importing/exporting data from/to XML-files available

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

.NET Client API
JDBC
ODBC
proprietary protocol (OpenAPI)

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

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

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

horizontal partitioning

Ingres Star to access multiple databases simultaneously

none

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

yes

Sharding

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Ingres Replicator

none

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

yes

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

MVCC

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.

yes

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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