DBMS > Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. PostGIS

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. PostGIS

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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.)

Search-as-a-service for web and mobile app development

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Spatial extension of PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	5.59
Rank	#63	Overall
	#7	Search engines

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	22.69
Rank	#29	Overall
	#1	Spatial DBMS

Website

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

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/search

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

postgis.net

Technical documentation

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

postgis.net/documentation

Developer

Microsoft

Initial release

1992

2015

1989

2005

Current release

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

3.4.2, February 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

GPL v2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C++

Server operating systems

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

hosted

Linux
Windows

Data scheme

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

yes

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

Supported programming languages

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

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

yes

based on PostgreSQL

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

yes

based on PostgreSQL

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

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

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

yes

using Azure authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes

based on PostgreSQL

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