DBMS > dBASE vs. Microsoft Access vs. SQLite vs. TerminusDB

System Properties Comparison dBASE vs. Microsoft Access vs. SQLite vs. TerminusDB

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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 embeddable, in-process RDBMS

Scalable Graph Database platform making enterprise data available by exploiting inferred entities and relationships

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
RDF store

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

Score	11.18
Rank	#44	Overall
	#28	Relational DBMS

Score	105.40
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	116.01
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Score	0.22
Rank	#323	Overall
	#28	Graph DBMS

Website

www.dbase.com

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

www.sqlite.org

terminusdb.com

Technical documentation

www.dbase.com/support/knowledgebase

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

terminusdb.github.io/terminusdb/#

Developer

Asthon Tate

Microsoft

Dwayne Richard Hipp

DataChemist Ltd.

Initial release

1979

1992

2000

2018

Current release

dBASE 2019, 2019

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

3.45.2 (12 March 2024), March 2024

11.0.0, January 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

Open Source

Public Domain

Open Source

GPL V3

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++

Prolog, Rust

Server operating systems

DOS

dBase Classic
Windows

dBase Pro

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

server-less

Linux

Data scheme

yes

dynamic column types

yes

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

SQL-like query language (WOQL)

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

OWL
RESTful HTTP API
WOQL (Web Object Query Language)

Supported programming languages

dBase proprietary IDE

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

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

JavaScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

The IDE can access stored procedures in other database systems.

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

Graph Partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

Journaling Streams

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 journaling

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

Role-based access control

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