DBMS > 4D vs. Adabas vs. Faircom DB vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. SQLite

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Adabas vs. Faircom DB vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. SQLite

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

OLTP - DBMS for mainframes and Linux/Unix/Windows environments

used typically together with the Natural programming platform

Native high-speed multi-model DBMS for relational and key-value store data simultaneously accessible through SQL and NoSQL APIs.

A horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service. It is the externalization of the core Google database that runs the biggest aspects of Google, like Ads and Google Play.

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Multivalue DBMS

Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	2.58
Rank	#108	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	3.17
Rank	#94	Overall
	#1	Multivalue DBMS

Score	0.20
Rank	#318	Overall
	#48	Key-value stores
	#141	Relational DBMS

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	114.32
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

www.softwareag.com/en_corporate/platform/adabas-natural.html

www.faircom.com/products/faircom-db

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.sqlite.org

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

docs.faircom.com/docs/en/UUID-7446ae34-a1a7-c843-c894-d5322e395184.html

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

Developer

4D, Inc

Software AG

FairCom Corporation

Google

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Initial release

1984

1971

1979

2017

2000

Current release

v20, April 2023

V12, November 2020

3.45.3 (15 April 2024), April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Restricted, free version available

commercial

Open Source

Public Domain

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Implementation language

ANSI C, C++

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

BS2000
Linux
Unix
Windows
z/OS
z/VSE

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
QNX
SCO
Solaris
VxWorks
Windows

easily portable to other OSs

hosted

server-less

Data scheme

yes

schema free, schema optional, schema required, partial schema,

yes

dynamic column types

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes, ANSI SQL Types, JSON, typed binary structures

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

yes

with add-on product Adabas SQL Gateway

yes, ANSI SQL with proprietary extensions

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

HTTP API

with add-on software Adabas SOA Gateway
SOAP-based API

with add-on software Adabas SOA Gateway

ADO.NET
Direct SQL
JDBC
JPA
ODBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON API
RESTful MQTT/JSON API
RPC

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

Natural

.Net
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js and browser)
PHP
Python
Visual Basic

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

in Natural

yes

.Net, JavaScript, C/C++

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

yes, with additonal products like Adabas Cluster Services, Adabas Parallel Services, Adabas Vista

File partitioning, horizontal partitioning, sharding

Customizable business rules for table partitioning

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

yes, with add-on product Event Replicator

yes, configurable to be parallel or serial, synchronous or asynchronous, uni-directional or bi-directional, ACID-consistent or eventually consistent (with custom conflict resolution).

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Tunable consistency per server, database, table, and transaction

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

tunable from ACID to Eventually Consistent

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

via file-system locks

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Yes, tunable from durable to delayed durability to in-memory

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

Users and groups

only with OS-specific tools (e.g. IBM RACF, CA Top Secret)

Fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard with additional protections for files

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

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