DBMS > 4D vs. Altibase vs. dBASE vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Altibase vs. dBASE vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

An enterprise grade, high-performance RDBMS

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.

Cloud Firestore is an auto-scaling document database for storing, syncing, and querying data for mobile and web apps. It offers seamless integration with other Firebase and Google Cloud Platform products.

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

Relational DBMS

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

Score	2.47
Rank	#110	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	1.02
Rank	#189	Overall
	#88	Relational DBMS

Score	9.70
Rank	#44	Overall
	#28	Relational DBMS

Score	7.36
Rank	#53	Overall
	#9	Document stores

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

altibase.com

www.dbase.com

firebase.google.com/products/firestore

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

github.com/ALTIBASE/Documents/tree/master/Manuals

www.dbase.com/support/knowledgebase

firebase.google.com/docs/firestore

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

4D, Inc

Altibase

Asthon Tate

Google

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

1984

1999

1979

2017

2014

Current release

v20, April 2023

v7.3, 2023, August 2023

dBASE 2019, 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open source edition discontinued with March 2023

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.

Implementation language

C++

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux

DOS

dBase Classic
Windows

dBase Pro

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

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

ANSI SQL-92

yes

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol

none

The IDE can access other DBMS or ODBC-sources.

Android
gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

C
C++
Java

dBase proprietary IDE

Go
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

stored procedures and stored functions

The IDE can access stored procedures in other database systems.

yes, Firebase Rules & Cloud Functions

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

yes, with Cloud Functions

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

none

Sharding

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

yes

none

Multi-source replication

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Using Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

not for dBase internal data, but IDE does support transactions when accessing external DBMS

yes

ACID

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.

yes

User concepts

Access control

Users and groups

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights for users and roles

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management. Security Rules for 3rd party authentication using Firebase Auth.

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

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