DBMS > Microsoft Access vs. MySQL vs. Postgres-XL vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Access vs. MySQL vs. Postgres-XL vs. Sphinx

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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.)

Widely used open source RDBMS

Based on PostgreSQL enhanced with MPP and write-scale-out cluster features

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	1083.74
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	0.49
Rank	#256	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

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

www.mysql.com

www.postgres-xl.org

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

dev.mysql.com/doc

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Microsoft

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

1992

1995

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

2001

Current release

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

8.4.0, April 2024

10 R1, October 2018

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

Open Source

Mozilla public license

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C++

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
macOS

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
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

XML type, but no XML query functionality

Secondary indexes

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

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

Proprietary protocol

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
C
C++
Delphi
Erlang
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

proprietary syntax

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

horizontal partitioning

Sharding

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

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

MVCC

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.

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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