DBMS > dBASE vs. mSQL vs. Sphinx vs. SQLite vs. STSdb

System Properties Comparison dBASE vs. mSQL vs. Sphinx vs. SQLite vs. STSdb

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.

mSQL (Mini SQL) is a simple and lightweight RDBMS

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

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

Key-Value Store with special method for indexing

optimized for high performance using a special indexing method

Primary database model

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

Score	9.70
Rank	#44	Overall
	#28	Relational DBMS

Score	1.27
Rank	#169	Overall
	#76	Relational DBMS

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	111.41
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Score	0.10
Rank	#357	Overall
	#51	Key-value stores

Website

www.dbase.com

hughestech.com.au/products/msql

sphinxsearch.com

www.sqlite.org

github.com/STSSoft/STSdb4

Technical documentation

www.dbase.com/support/knowledgebase

sphinxsearch.com/docs

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

Developer

Asthon Tate

Hughes Technologies

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Dwayne Richard Hipp

STS Soft SC

Initial release

1979

1994

2001

2000

2011

Current release

dBASE 2019, 2019

4.4, October 2021

3.5.1, February 2023

3.46.0 (23 May 2024), May 2024

4.0.8, September 2015

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free licenses can be provided

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

Public Domain

Open Source

GPLv2, commercial license available

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

DOS

dBase Classic
Windows

dBase Pro

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

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

server-less

Windows

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

primitive types and user defined types (classes)

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

A subset of ANSI SQL is implemented

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

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

APIs and other access methods

none

The IDE can access other DBMS or ODBC-sources.

JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

.NET Client API

Supported programming languages

dBase proprietary IDE

C
C++
Delphi
Java
Perl
PHP
Tcl

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

C#
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

The IDE can access stored procedures in other database systems.

Triggers

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

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

none

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

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

via file-system locks

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

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

Access rights for users and roles

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