DBMS > Interbase vs. Microsoft Access vs. MySQL vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. SwayDB

System Properties Comparison Interbase vs. Microsoft Access vs. MySQL vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. SwayDB

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.)

Widely used open source RDBMS

Widely used in-process key-value store

An embeddable, non-blocking, type-safe key-value store for single or multiple disks and in-memory storage

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Key-value store

supports sorted and unsorted key sets
Native XML DBMS

in the Oracle Berkeley DB XML version

Key-value store

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial 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	1083.74
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	2.21
Rank	#117	Overall
	#20	Key-value stores
	#3	Native XML DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#382	Overall
	#59	Key-value stores

Website

www.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

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

www.mysql.com

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/berkeleydb.html

swaydb.simer.au

Technical documentation

docs.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

dev.mysql.com/doc

docs.oracle.com/cd/E17076_05/html/index.html

Developer

Embarcadero

Microsoft

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Oracle

originally developed by Sleepycat, which was acquired by Oracle

Simer Plaha

Initial release

1984

1992

1995

1994

2018

Current release

InterBase 2020, December 2019

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

8.4.0, April 2024

18.1.40, May 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

Open Source

commercial license available

Open Source

GNU Affero GPL V3.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

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Implementation language

C++

C and C++

C, Java, C++ (depending on the Berkeley DB edition)

Scala

Server operating systems

Android
iOS
Linux
OS X
Windows

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

AIX
Android
FreeBSD
iOS
Linux
OS X
Solaris
VxWorks
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

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.

export as XML data possible

yes

only with the Berkeley DB XML edition

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

SQL interfaced based on SQLite is available

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Supported programming languages

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

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

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

.Net

Figaro is a .Net framework assembly that extends Berkeley DB XML into an embeddable database engine for .NET
others

Third-party libraries to manipulate Berkeley DB files are available for many languages
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party binding
Perl
Python
Tcl

Java
Kotlin
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Interbase procedure and trigger language

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

proprietary syntax

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

only for the SQL API

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Interbase Change Views

none

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication

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

not for MyISAM storage engine

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

Atomic execution of operations

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Multiversion concurreny control

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

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

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

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