DBMS > MariaDB vs. Microsoft Access vs. Postgres-XL vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison MariaDB vs. Microsoft Access vs. Postgres-XL vs. Sphinx

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

MySQL application compatible open source RDBMS, enhanced with high availability, security, interoperability and performance capabilities. MariaDB ColumnStore provides a column-oriented storage engine and MariaDB Xpand supports distributed SQL.

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.)

Based on PostgreSQL enhanced with MPP and write-scale-out cluster features

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

with OQGraph storage engine
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	93.21
Rank	#13	Overall
	#9	Relational DBMS

Score	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	0.49
Rank	#256	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

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

www.postgres-xl.org

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

MariaDB Corporation Ab (MariaDB Enterprise),
MariaDB Foundation (community MariaDB Server)

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

Microsoft

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

1992

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

2001

Current release

11.3.2, February 2024

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

10 R1, October 2018

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription available

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

Open Source

Mozilla public license

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

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 and C++

C++

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

Linux
macOS

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

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

XML type, but no XML query functionality

Secondary indexes

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

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

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

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

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

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Erlang
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

PL/SQL compatibility added with version 10.3

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

none

horizontal partitioning

Sharding

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source 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

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

ACID

MVCC

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

not for in-memory storage engine

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

with MEMORY storage engine

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

MariaDB is the most powerful open source relational database – modern SQL and JSON...
» more

Competitive advantages

MariaDB Servers have many features unavailable in other open source relational databases....
» more

Typical application scenarios

Web, SaaS and Cloud operational applications that require high availability, scalability...
» more

Key customers

Deutsche Bank, DBS Bank, Nasdaq, Red Hat, ServiceNow, Verizon and Walgreens Featured...
» more

Market metrics

MariaDB is the default database in the LAMP stack supplied by Red Hat and SUSE Linux,...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

MariaDB plc subscriptions cover our free, open source database, Community Server,...
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