DBMS > Interbase vs. Microsoft Access vs. MongoDB vs. QuestDB vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Interbase vs. Microsoft Access vs. MongoDB vs. QuestDB vs. Sphinx

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Light-weight proven RDBMS

originally from Borland

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.)

One of the most popular document stores available both as a fully managed cloud service and for deployment on self-managed infrastructure

A high performance open source SQL database for time series data

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

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS
Search engine

integrated Lucene index, currently in MongoDB Atlas only.
Time Series DBMS

Time Series Collections introduced in Release 5.0
Vector DBMS

currently available in the MongoDB Atlas cloud service only

Relational DBMS

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

Score	4.61
Rank	#72	Overall
	#39	Relational DBMS

Score	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	421.65
Rank	#5	Overall
	#1	Document stores

Score	2.52
Rank	#109	Overall
	#9	Time Series DBMS

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

www.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

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

www.mongodb.com

questdb.io

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

docs.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

www.mongodb.com/docs/manual

questdb.io/docs

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Embarcadero

Microsoft

MongoDB, Inc

QuestDB Technology Inc

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

1984

1992

2009

2014

2001

Current release

InterBase 2020, December 2019

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

6.0.7, June 2023

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

Open Source

MongoDB Inc.'s Server Side Public License v1. Prior versions were published under GNU AGPL v3.0. Commercial licenses are also available.

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

MongoDB available as DBaaS (MongoDB Atlas)

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Implementation language

C++

Java (Zero-GC), C++, Rust

C++

Server operating systems

Android
iOS
Linux
OS X
Windows

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
macOS
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Although schema-free, documents of the same collection often follow the same structure. Optionally impose all or part of a schema by defining a JSON schema.

yes

schema-free via InfluxDB Line Protocol

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, integer, double, decimal, boolean, date, object_id, geospatial

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.

export as XML data possible

Secondary indexes

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

Read-only SQL queries via the MongoDB Atlas SQL Interface

SQL with time-series extensions

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

GraphQL
HTTP REST
Prisma
proprietary protocol using JSON

HTTP REST
InfluxDB Line Protocol (TCP/UDP)
JDBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java
Object Pascal
PHP
Ruby

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

Actionscript

unofficial driver
C
C#
C++
Clojure

unofficial driver
ColdFusion

unofficial driver
D

unofficial driver
Dart

unofficial driver
Delphi

unofficial driver
Erlang
Go
Groovy

unofficial driver
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Kotlin
Lisp

unofficial driver
Lua

unofficial driver
MatLab

unofficial driver
Perl
PHP
PowerShell

unofficial driver
Prolog

unofficial driver
Python
R

unofficial driver
Ruby
Rust
Scala
Smalltalk

unofficial driver
Swift

PostgreSQL driver
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Rust

over HTTP

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Interbase procedure and trigger language

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

JavaScript

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

in MongoDB Atlas only

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Partitioned by hashed, ranged, or zoned sharding keys. Live resharding allows users to change their shard keys as an online operation with zero downtime.

horizontal partitioning (by timestamps)

Sharding

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Interbase Change Views

none

Multi-Source deployments with MongoDB Atlas Global Clusters
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication with eventual consistency

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

can be individually decided for each read operation
Immediate Consistency

default behaviour

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

typically not used, however similar functionality with DBRef possible

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

Multi-document ACID Transactions with snapshot isolation

ACID for single-table writes

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Multiversion concurreny control

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

but no files for transaction logging

yes

optional, enabled by default

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

In-memory storage engine introduced with MongoDB version 3.2

yes

through memory mapped files

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

Access rights for users and roles

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

MongoDB provides an integrated suite of cloud database and data services to accelerate...
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Relational model with native time series support Column-based storage and time partitioned...
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Competitive advantages

Built around the flexible document data model and unified API, MongoDB is a developer...
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High ingestion throughput: peak of 4M rows/sec (TSBS Benchmark) Code optimizations...
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Typical application scenarios

AI-enriched intelligent apps (Continental, Telefonica, Iron Mountain) Internet of...
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Financial tick data Industrial IoT Application Metrics Monitoring
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Key customers

ADP, Adobe, Amadeus, AstraZeneca, Auto Trader, Barclays, BBVA, Bosch, Cisco, CERN,...
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Banks & Hedge funds, Yahoo, OKX, Airbus, Aquis Exchange, Net App, Cloudera, Airtel,...
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Market metrics

Hundreds of millions downloads, over 150,000+ Atlas clusters provisioned every month...
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Licensing and pricing models

MongoDB database server: Server-Side Public License (SSPL) . Commercial licenses...
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Open source Apache 2.0 QuestDB Enterprise QuestDB Cloud
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