DBMS > 4D vs. AlaSQL vs. Couchbase vs. PlanetScale vs. Trafodion

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. AlaSQL vs. Couchbase vs. PlanetScale vs. Trafodion

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Apache Trafodion has been retired in 2021. Therefore it is excluded from the DB-Engines Ranking.

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

JavaScript DBMS library

A distributed document store with integrated cache, a powerful search engine, in-built operational and analytical capabilities, and an embedded mobile database

Scalable, distributed, serverless MySQL database platform built on top of Vitess

Transactional SQL-on-Hadoop DBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store
Relational DBMS

Document store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Key-value store

originating from the former Membase product and supporting the Memcached protocol
Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.58
Rank	#108	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	0.46
Rank	#260	Overall
	#40	Document stores
	#121	Relational DBMS

Score	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	1.59
Rank	#151	Overall
	#70	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

github.com/AlaSQL/alasql

docs.couchbase.com

planetscale.com/docs

trafodion.apache.org/documentation.html

Developer

4D, Inc

Andrey Gershun & Mathias R. Wulff

Couchbase, Inc.

PlanetScale

Apache Software Foundation, originally developed by HP

Initial release

1984

2014

2011

2020

2014

Current release

v20, April 2023

Server: 7.2, June 2023; Mobile: 3.1, March 2022; Couchbase Capella (DBaaS), June 2023

2.3.0, February 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

MIT-License

Open Source

Business Source License (BSL 1.1); Commercial licenses also available

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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

JavaScript

C, C++, Go and Erlang

C++, Java

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

Linux
OS X
Windows

Docker
Linux
macOS

Linux

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

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

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

Close to SQL99, but no user access control, stored procedures and host language bindings.

SQL++, extends ANSI SQL to JSON for operational, transactional, and analytic use cases

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

JavaScript API

CLI Client
HTTP REST
Kafka Connector
Native language bindings for CRUD, Query, Search and Analytics APIs
Spark Connector
Spring Data

ADO.NET
JDBC
MySQL protocol
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

JavaScript

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/ADO.Net

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Functions and timers in JavaScript and UDFs in Java, Python, SQL++

yes

proprietary syntax

Java Stored Procedures

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

none

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes, via HBase

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

via user defined functions and HBase

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

none

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Eventual Consistency across shards
Immediate Consistency within a shard

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

yes

only for local storage and DOM-storage

ACID

ACID at shard level

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using IndexedDB, SQL.JS or proprietary FileStorage

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

Ephemeral buckets

yes

User concepts

Access control

Users and groups

User and Administrator separation with password-based and LDAP integrated Authentication. Role-base access control.

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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