DBMS > Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. MySQL vs. SAP Adaptive Server

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. MySQL vs. SAP Adaptive Server

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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.)

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Widely used open source RDBMS

The SAP (Sybase) Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) is an enterprise-class RDBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS

Spatial DBMS

with Boeing's Spatial Query Server

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

Score	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	1083.74
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	36.31
Rank	#25	Overall
	#17	Relational DBMS

Website

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

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

www.mysql.com

www.sap.com/products/technology-platform/sybase-ase.html

Technical documentation

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

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

dev.mysql.com/doc

help.sap.com/docs/SAP_ASE

Developer

Microsoft

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

SAP, Sybase

Initial release

1992

1989

1995

1987

Current release

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

8.4.0, April 2024

16.0

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

commercial

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.

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Implementation language

C++

C and C++

Server operating systems

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

Linux
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Unix
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

with proprietary extensions

yes

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native 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#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

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

C
C++
Cobol
Java
Java
Perl
PHP
Python

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

yes

proprietary syntax

Java and Transact-SQL

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

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

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

horizontal partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

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

but no files for transaction logging

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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