DBMS > Microsoft Access vs. MySQL vs. Neo4j vs. Sphinx vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Access vs. MySQL vs. Neo4j vs. Sphinx vs. TimescaleDB

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.)

Widely used open source RDBMS

Scalable, ACID-compliant graph database designed with a high-performance distributed cluster architecture, available in self-hosted and cloud offerings

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

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Graph DBMS

Search engine

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	101.16
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	1061.34
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	4.46
Rank	#71	Overall
	#5	Time Series DBMS

Website

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

Technical documentation

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

dev.mysql.com/doc

neo4j.com/docs

sphinxsearch.com/docs

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Microsoft

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Neo4j, Inc.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Timescale

Initial release

1992

1995

2007

2001

2017

Current release

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

8.4.0, April 2024

5.20, May 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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.

Aiven for MySQL: Fully managed MySQL, deployable in the cloud of your choice, with seamless integrations and lightning-fast setup.

Neo4j Aura: Neo4j’s fully managed cloud service: The zero-admin, always-on graph database for cloud developers.

Implementation language

C++

C and C++

Java, Scala

C++

Server operating systems

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux

Can also be used server-less as embedded Java database.
OS X
Solaris
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

yes

with proprietary extensions

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

Proprietary protocol

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

Supported programming languages

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

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

.Net
Clojure
Elixir
Go
Groovy
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

proprietary syntax

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

via event handler

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Sharding

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

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

none

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Causal and Eventual Consistency configurable in Causal Cluster setup
Immediate Consistency in stand-alone mode

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

Relationships in graphs

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

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

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

Users, roles and permissions. Pluggable authentication with supported standards (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos)

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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Key customers

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Market metrics

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Licensing and pricing models

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