DBMS > Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Sphinx vs. VoltDB

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Sphinx vs. VoltDB

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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.)

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Distributed In-Memory NewSQL RDBMS

Used for OLTP applications with a high frequency of relatively simple transactions, that can hold all their data in memory

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	101.16
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	27.71
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	1.47
Rank	#157	Overall
	#73	Relational DBMS

Website

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

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

sphinxsearch.com

www.voltdb.com

Technical documentation

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

sphinxsearch.com/docs

docs.voltdb.com

Developer

Microsoft

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

VoltDB Inc.

Initial release

1992

2014

2001

2010

Current release

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

3.5.1, February 2023

11.3, April 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

AGPL for Community Edition, commercial license for Enterprise, AWS, and Pro Editions

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++

Java, C++

Server operating systems

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
OS X

for development

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

SQL-like query language

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

only a subset of SQL 99

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

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

Proprietary protocol

Java API
JDBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

C#
C++
Erlang

not officially supported
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

JavaScript

Java

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

JavaScript

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

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

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

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*

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

FOREIGN KEY constraints are not supported

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

Transactions are executed single-threaded within stored procedures

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Data access is serialized by the server

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

but no files for transaction logging

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

yes

Snapshots and command logging

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

Users and roles with access to stored procedures

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