DBMS > 4D vs. AllegroGraph vs. Firebird vs. PostgreSQL vs. RDF4J

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. AllegroGraph vs. Firebird vs. PostgreSQL vs. RDF4J

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

High performance, persistent RDF store with additional support for Graph DBMS

Firebird is an open source RDBMS forked from Borland's InterBase

Widely used open source RDBMS

Developed as objectoriented DBMS (Postgres), gradually enhanced with 'standards' like SQL

RDF4J is a Java framework for processing RDF data, supporting both memory-based and a disk-based storage.

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

with version 6.5
Graph DBMS
RDF store
Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

with object oriented extensions, e.g.: user defined types/functions and inheritance. Handling of key/value pairs with hstore module.

RDF store

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

with Apache Age
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

with pgvector extension

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

Score	2.58
Rank	#108	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	1.06
Rank	#187	Overall
	#30	Document stores
	#17	Graph DBMS
	#7	RDF stores
	#7	Vector DBMS

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	645.54
Rank	#4	Overall
	#4	Relational DBMS

Score	0.69
Rank	#230	Overall
	#9	RDF stores

Website

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

franz.com/agraph/support/documentation/current/agraph-introduction.html

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

www.postgresql.org/docs

rdf4j.org/documentation

Developer

4D, Inc

Franz Inc.

Firebird Foundation

PostgreSQL Global Development Group

www.postgresql.org/developer

Since 2016 officially forked into an Eclipse project, former developer was Aduna Software.

Initial release

1984

2004

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

1989

1989: Postgres, 1996: PostgreSQL

2004

Current release

v20, April 2023

8.0, December 2023

5.0.0, January 2024

16.2, February 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Limited community edition free

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

BSD

Open Source

Eclipse Distribution License (EDL), v1.0.

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.

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Implementation language

C and C++

Java

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
NetBSD
OpenBSD
OS X
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

Data scheme

yes

RDF schemas

yes

RDF Schemas

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

bulk load of XML files possible

yes

specific XML-type available, but no XML query functionality.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

SPARQL is used as query language

yes

standard with numerous extensions

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

RESTful HTTP API
SPARQL

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Java API
RIO

RDF Input/Output
Sail API
SeRQL

Sesame RDF Query Language
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

C#
Clojure
Java
Lisp
Perl
Python
Ruby
Scala

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

Java
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

JavaScript or Common Lisp

PSQL

user defined functions

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

yes

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

with Federation

none

partitioning by range, list and (since PostgreSQL 11) by hash

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Isolation support depends on the API used

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Features a multi-generational MVCC architecture, readers do not block writers

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

in-memory storage is supported as well

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Knowledge Graph Platform Leader FedShard - Designed for Entity-Event Knowledge Graph...
» more

Competitive advantages

AllegroGraph is uniquely suited to support adhoc queries through SPARQL, Prolog and...
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News

Can Neuro-Symbolic AI Solve AI’s Weaknesses?
17 April 2024

100 Companies That Matter in KM – Franz Inc.
3 April 2024

Exploring AllegroGraph v8 – Unleashing the Power of Neuro-Symbolic AI (Recorded Webinar)
9 February 2024

What is Neuro-Symbolic AI?
23 January 2024

Allegro CL v11 – Now Available! – The Neuro-Symbolic AI Programming Platform
8 January 2024

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.

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