DBMS > 4D vs. Amazon CloudSearch vs. Amazon DynamoDB vs. Faircom DB vs. FileMaker

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Amazon CloudSearch vs. Amazon DynamoDB vs. Faircom DB vs. FileMaker

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

A hosted search engine service by Amazon with the data stored in Amazons cloud

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

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

FileMaker is a cross-platform RDBMS that includes a GUI frontend.

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Document store
Key-value store

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	1.85
Rank	#137	Overall
	#12	Search engines

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

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

Score	48.20
Rank	#20	Overall
	#14	Relational DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

www.faircom.com/products/faircom-db

www.claris.com/filemaker

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

docs.aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

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

www.claris.com/resources/documentation

Developer

4D, Inc

Amazon

FairCom Corporation

Claris

a subsidiary of Apple

Initial release

1984

2012

1979

1983

Current release

v20, April 2023

V12, November 2020

19.4.1, November 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

commercial

Restricted, free version available

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

ANSI C, C++

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

hosted

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

easily portable to other OSs

iOS

client part only
Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

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

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes, ANSI SQL Types, JSON, typed binary structures

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

A http query request can return the data in XML format

Secondary indexes

yes

all search fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

yes, ANSI SQL with proprietary extensions

yes

via plugins

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

HTTP API

RESTful HTTP API

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

Filemaker WebDirect
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

PHP

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

.Net, JavaScript, C/C++

yes

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

yes

automatic partitioning across Amazon Search Instance as required

Sharding

File partitioning, horizontal partitioning, sharding

Customizable business rules for table partitioning

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

yes

managed transparently by AWS

yes

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

Source-replica replication, warm standby

since Version 14

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

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

tunable from ACID to Eventually Consistent

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

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

authentication via encrypted signatures

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

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

simple rights management via user accounts and connection to external directory services

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