DBMS > Microsoft Access vs. mSQL vs. SAP Advantage Database Server vs. Sphinx vs. SQLite

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Access vs. mSQL vs. SAP Advantage Database Server vs. Sphinx vs. SQLite

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

SAP Advantage Database Server seems to be discontinued. Therefore it is excluded from the DB-Engines Ranking.

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.)

mSQL (Mini SQL) is a simple and lightweight RDBMS

Low-cost RDBMS with access to ISAM and FoxPro data structures

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

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Relational DBMS

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

Score	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	1.27
Rank	#167	Overall
	#77	Relational DBMS

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	114.32
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Website

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

hughestech.com.au/products/msql

www.sap.com/products/advantage-database-server.html

sphinxsearch.com

www.sqlite.org

Technical documentation

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

sphinxsearch.com/docs

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

Developer

Microsoft

Hughes Technologies

Sybase, SAP

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Initial release

1992

1994

1993

2001

2000

Current release

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

4.4, October 2021

3.5.1, February 2023

3.45.3 (15 April 2024), April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

free licenses can be provided

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

Public Domain

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++

Server operating systems

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris SPARC/x86
Windows

Linux
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

server-less

Data scheme

yes

dynamic column types

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

A subset of ANSI SQL is implemented

no subqueries, aggregate functions, views, foreign keys, triggers

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

JDBC
ODBC

.NET Client API
ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB

Proprietary protocol

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

Supported programming languages

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

C
C++
Delphi
Java
Perl
PHP
Tcl

Delphi
Perl
PHP

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

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

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

Multi-source replication

CONFLICT Trigger to resolve replication conflicts
Source-replica replication

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

none

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

via file-system locks

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.

caching of (temporary) tables can be configured

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

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