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

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

Widely used open source RDBMS

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

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

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Search engine

Time Series DBMS

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

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

Spatial 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	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	4.46
Rank	#71	Overall
	#5	Time Series DBMS

Score	4.27
Rank	#73	Overall
	#13	Document stores
	#4	Graph DBMS
	#2	Native XML DBMS
	#39	Relational DBMS
	#2	RDF stores
	#9	Search engines

Website

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

www.mysql.com

sphinxsearch.com

www.timescale.com

virtuoso.openlinksw.com

Technical documentation

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

dev.mysql.com/doc

sphinxsearch.com/docs

docs.timescale.com

docs.openlinksw.com/virtuoso

Developer

Microsoft

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Timescale

OpenLink Software

Initial release

1992

1995

2001

2017

1998

Current release

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

8.4.0, April 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

2.15.0, May 2024

7.2.11, September 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

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

GPLv2, extended commercial license 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

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

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

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

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

yes

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

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Proprietary protocol

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

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

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

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

.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

yes

proprietary syntax

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

yes

Virtuoso PL

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

Sharding

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

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

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

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

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

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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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