DBMS > 4D vs. Alibaba Cloud Table Store vs. Amazon DynamoDB vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Google Cloud Spanner

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Alibaba Cloud Table Store vs. Amazon DynamoDB vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Google Cloud Spanner

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

A fully managed Wide Column Store for large quantities of semi-structured data with real-time access

Hosted, scalable database service by Amazon with the data stored in Amazons cloud

Cloud-hosted realtime document store. iOS, Android, and JavaScript clients share one Realtime Database instance and automatically receive updates with the newest data.

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.

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Wide column store

Document store
Key-value store

Document store

Relational DBMS

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

Score	2.58
Rank	#108	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	0.26
Rank	#301	Overall
	#12	Wide column stores

Score	74.07
Rank	#17	Overall
	#3	Document stores
	#2	Key-value stores

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

www.alibabacloud.com/product/table-store

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

cloud.google.com/spanner

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/tablestore

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

firebase.google.com/docs/database

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

Developer

4D, Inc

Alibaba

Amazon

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Google

Initial release

1984

2016

2012

2017

Current release

v20, April 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

commercial

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.

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

hosted

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

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

HTTP API

RESTful HTTP API

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

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

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

Java
Python

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

limited functionality with using 'rules'

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

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

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Atomic single-row operations

ACID

ACID across one or more tables within a single AWS account and region

yes

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

User concepts

Access control

Users and groups

Access rights based on subaccounts and tokens

Access rights for users and roles can be defined via the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

yes, based on authentication and database rules

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

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