DBMS > dBASE vs. Microsoft Access vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. SQLite vs. SurrealDB

System Properties Comparison dBASE vs. Microsoft Access vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. SQLite vs. SurrealDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

dBase was one of the first databases with a development environment on PC's. Its latest version dBase V is still sold as dBase classic, which needs a DOS Emulation. The up-to-date product is dBase plus.

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 in-process key-value store

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

A fully ACID transactional, developer-friendly, multi-model DBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

supports sorted and unsorted key sets
Native XML DBMS

in the Oracle Berkeley DB XML version

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

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

Score	9.70
Rank	#44	Overall
	#28	Relational DBMS

Score	101.16
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	2.01
Rank	#126	Overall
	#21	Key-value stores
	#3	Native XML DBMS

Score	111.41
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Score	1.02
Rank	#190	Overall
	#33	Document stores
	#18	Graph DBMS

Website

www.dbase.com

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

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/berkeleydb.html

www.sqlite.org

surrealdb.com

Technical documentation

www.dbase.com/support/knowledgebase

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

docs.oracle.com/cd/E17076_05/html/index.html

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

surrealdb.com/docs

Developer

Asthon Tate

Microsoft

Oracle

originally developed by Sleepycat, which was acquired by Oracle

Dwayne Richard Hipp

SurrealDB Ltd

Initial release

1979

1992

1994

2000

2022

Current release

dBASE 2019, 2019

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

18.1.40, May 2020

3.46.0 (23 May 2024), May 2024

v1.5.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

Open Source

commercial license available

Open Source

Public Domain

Open Source

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.

Implementation language

C++

C, Java, C++ (depending on the Berkeley DB edition)

Rust

Server operating systems

DOS

dBase Classic
Windows

dBase Pro

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

AIX
Android
FreeBSD
iOS
Linux
OS X
Solaris
VxWorks
Windows

server-less

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

dynamic column types

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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

only with the Berkeley DB XML edition

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

yes

SQL interfaced based on SQLite is available

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

none

The IDE can access other DBMS or ODBC-sources.

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

GraphQL
RESTful HTTP API
WebSocket

Supported programming languages

dBase proprietary IDE

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

.Net

Figaro is a .Net framework assembly that extends Berkeley DB XML into an embeddable database engine for .NET
others

Third-party libraries to manipulate Berkeley DB files are available for many languages
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party binding
Perl
Python
Tcl

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

Deno
Go
JavaScript (Node.js)
Rust

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

The IDE can access stored procedures in other database systems.

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

only for the SQL API

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

Source-replica replication

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

not for dBase internal data, but IDE does support transactions when accessing external DBMS

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

via file-system locks

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

Access rights for users and roles

a simple user-level security was built in till version Access 2003

yes, based on authentication and database rules

More information provided by the system vendor

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.