DBMS > 4D vs. Amazon DynamoDB vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. FoundationDB vs. Google Cloud Bigtable

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Amazon DynamoDB vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. FoundationDB vs. Google Cloud Bigtable

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market. As a consequence, the product was removed from the DB-Engines ranking. In April 2018, Apple open-sourced FoundationDB and it therefore reappears in the ranking.

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

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.

Ordered key-value store. Core features are complimented by layers.

Google's NoSQL Big Data database service. It's the same database that powers many core Google services, including Search, Analytics, Maps, and Gmail.

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store
Key-value store

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Key-value store
Wide column store

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

Score	2.37
Rank	#110	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	70.06
Rank	#17	Overall
	#3	Document stores
	#2	Key-value stores

Score	13.60
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	0.97
Rank	#191	Overall
	#32	Document stores
	#28	Key-value stores
	#87	Relational DBMS

Score	2.97
Rank	#92	Overall
	#15	Key-value stores
	#8	Wide column stores

Website

www.4d.com

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

github.com/apple/foundationdb

cloud.google.com/bigtable

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

firebase.google.com/docs/database

apple.github.io/foundationdb

cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs

Developer

4D, Inc

Amazon

Google

acquired by Google 2014

FoundationDB

Google

Initial release

1984

2012

2013

2015

Current release

v20, April 2023

6.2.28, November 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

some layers support schemas

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

some layers support typing

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

supported in specific SQL layer only

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

RESTful HTTP API

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
HappyBase (Python library)
HBase compatible API (Java)

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

limited functionality with using 'rules'

in SQL-layer only

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

yes

Internal replication in Colossus, and regional replication between two clusters in different zones

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

yes

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

Linearizable consistency

Immediate consistency (for a single cluster), Eventual consistency (for two or more replicated clusters)

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

in SQL-layer only

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

yes

ACID

Atomic single-row operations

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 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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