DBMS > Lovefield vs. Microsoft Access vs. mSQL vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Lovefield vs. Microsoft Access vs. mSQL vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Embeddable relational database for web apps written in pure JavaScript

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.)

mSQL (Mini SQL) is a simple and lightweight RDBMS

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

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

Score	0.33
Rank	#286	Overall
	#131	Relational DBMS

Score	101.16
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	1.27
Rank	#169	Overall
	#76	Relational DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

google.github.io/lovefield

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

hughestech.com.au/products/msql

www.snowflake.com

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

github.com/google/lovefield/blob/master/docs/spec_index.md

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Google

Microsoft

Hughes Technologies

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2014

1992

1994

2014

2001

Current release

2.1.12, February 2017

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

4.4, October 2021

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

free licenses can be provided

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

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

Implementation language

JavaScript

C++

Server operating systems

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

tested with Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris SPARC/x86
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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

via JavaScript builder pattern

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

A subset of ANSI SQL is implemented

no subqueries, aggregate functions, views, foreign keys, triggers

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

JDBC
ODBC

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

JavaScript

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

C
C++
Delphi
Java
Perl
PHP
Tcl

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

user defined functions

Triggers

Using read-only observers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

yes

Sharding

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

yes

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

none

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

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes, by using IndexedDB or the cloud service Firebase Realtime Database

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

using MemoryDB

User concepts

Access control

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

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

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