DBMS > Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. SpaceTime vs. Virtuoso

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. SpaceTime vs. Virtuoso

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.)

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

SpaceTime is a spatio-temporal DBMS with a focus on performance.

Virtuoso is a multi-model hybrid-RDBMS that supports management of data represented as relational tables and/or property graphs

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Native XML DBMS
Relational DBMS
RDF store
Search engine

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Document store

If a column is of type dynamic docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/scalar-data-types/dynamic then it's possible to add arbitrary JSON documents in this cell
Event Store

this is the general usage pattern at Microsoft. Billing, Logs, Telemetry events are stored in ADX and the state of an individual entity is defined by the arg_max(timestamps)
Spatial DBMS
Search engine

support for complex search expressions docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/parseoperator FTS, Geospatial docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/geo-point-to-geohash-function distributed search -> ADX acts as a distributed search engine
Time Series DBMS

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer/time-series-analysis

Relational DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	29.04
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#7	Spatial DBMS

Score	4.26
Rank	#78	Overall
	#13	Document stores
	#4	Graph DBMS
	#2	Native XML DBMS
	#42	Relational DBMS
	#2	RDF stores
	#9	Search engines

Website

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

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.mireo.com/spacetime

virtuoso.openlinksw.com

Technical documentation

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer

docs.openlinksw.com/virtuoso

Developer

Microsoft

Mireo

OpenLink Software

Initial release

1992

2014

2019

2020

1998

Current release

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

cloud service with continuous releases

7.2.11, September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

Open Source

GPLv2, extended commercial license 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

C++

Server operating systems

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

hosted

Linux

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

SQL - Standard relational schema
RDF - Quad (S, P, O, G) or Triple (S, P, O)
XML - DTD, XML Schema
DAV - freeform filesystem objects, plus User Defined Types a/k/a Dynamic Extension Type

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

yes

bool, datetime, dynamic, guid, int, long, real, string, timespan, double: docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/scalar-data-types

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

All properties auto-indexed by default

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

SQL-like query language

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

A subset of ANSI SQL is implemented

yes

SQL-92, SQL-200x, SQL-3, SQLX

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

Microsoft SQL Server communication protocol (MS-TDS)
RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
GeoSPARQL
HTTP API
JDBC
Jena RDF API
ODBC
OLE DB
RDF4J API
RESTful HTTP API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SOAP webservices
SPARQL 1.1
WebDAV
XPath
XQuery
XSLT

Supported programming languages

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

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

.Net
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PowerShell
Python
R

C#
C++
Python

.Net
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Visual Basic

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

JavaScript

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

yes

Virtuoso PL

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

JavaScript

yes

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/management/updatepolicy

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Fixed-grid hypercubes

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service. Replication either local, cross-facility or geo-redundant.

Real-time block device replication (DRBD)

Chain, star, and bi-directional replication
Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Spark connector (open source): github.com/Azure/azure-kusto-spark

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

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

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

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

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

Azure Active Directory Authentication

yes

Fine-grained Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) in addition to typical coarse-grained Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) according to SQL-standard. Pluggable authentication with supported standards (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos)

More information provided by the system vendor

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Competitive advantages

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Typical application scenarios

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Key customers

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Market metrics

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Licensing and pricing models

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