DBMS > Interbase vs. Microsoft Access vs. Spark SQL vs. SQLite vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Interbase vs. Microsoft Access vs. Spark SQL vs. SQLite vs. TimescaleDB

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.)

Spark SQL is a component on top of 'Spark Core' for structured data processing

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Relational DBMS

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

Score	4.08
Rank	#75	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	101.16
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	18.04
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Score	111.41
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Score	4.46
Rank	#71	Overall
	#5	Time Series DBMS

Website

www.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

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

spark.apache.org/sql

www.sqlite.org

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

docs.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

spark.apache.org/docs/latest/sql-programming-guide.html

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Embarcadero

Microsoft

Apache Software Foundation

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Timescale

Initial release

1984

1992

2014

2000

2017

Current release

InterBase 2020, December 2019

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

3.46.0 (23 May 2024), May 2024

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Public Domain

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Implementation language

C++

Scala

Server operating systems

Android
iOS
Linux
OS X
Windows

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

Linux
OS X
Windows

server-less

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

dynamic column types

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

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

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

Java
Python
R
Scala

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

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Interbase procedure and trigger language

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

yes, utilizing Spark Core

none

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Interbase Change Views

none

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

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

Multiversion concurreny control

yes

via file-system locks

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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