DBMS > 4D vs. Amazon DynamoDB vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. SAP Advantage Database Server vs. Sqrrl

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Amazon DynamoDB vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. SAP Advantage Database Server vs. Sqrrl

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

SAP Advantage Database Server seems to be discontinued. Therefore it is excluded from the DB-Engines Ranking.

Sqrrl has been acquired by Amazon and became a part of Amazon Web Services. It has been removed from the DB-Engines ranking.

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

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

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Low-cost RDBMS with access to ISAM and FoxPro data structures

Adaptable, secure NoSQL built on Apache Accumulo

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store
Key-value store

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Secondary database models

Document store

If a column is of type dynamic docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/scalar-data-types/dynamic then it's possible to add arbitrary JSON documents in this cell
Event Store

this is the general usage pattern at Microsoft. Billing, Logs, Telemetry events are stored in ADX and the state of an individual entity is defined by the arg_max(timestamps)
Spatial DBMS
Search engine

support for complex search expressions docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/parseoperator FTS, Geospatial docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/geo-point-to-geohash-function distributed search -> ADX acts as a distributed search engine
Time Series DBMS

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer/time-series-analysis

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	3.28
Rank	#83	Overall
	#45	Relational DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.sap.com/products/advantage-database-server.html

sqrrl.com

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer

Developer

4D, Inc

Amazon

Microsoft

Sybase, SAP

Amazon

originally Sqrrl Data, Inc.

Initial release

1984

2012

2019

1993

2012

Current release

v20, April 2023

cloud service with continuous releases

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.

Implementation language

Java

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

bool, datetime, dynamic, guid, int, long, real, string, timespan, double: docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/scalar-data-types

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

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

RESTful HTTP API

Microsoft SQL Server communication protocol (MS-TDS)
RESTful HTTP API

.NET Client API
ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB

Accumulo Shell
Java API
JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API
Thrift

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PowerShell
Python
R

Delphi
Perl
PHP

Actionscript
C

using GLib
C#
C++
Cocoa
Delphi
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Smalltalk

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

yes

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/management/updatepolicy

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

Sharding

making use of Hadoop

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service. Replication either local, cross-facility or geo-redundant.

Multi-source replication

CONFLICT Trigger to resolve replication conflicts
Source-replica replication

selectable replication factor

making use of Hadoop

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

Spark connector (open source): github.com/Azure/azure-kusto-spark

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
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Document store kept consistent with combination of global timestamping, row-level transactions, and server-side consistency resolution.

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

ACID

Atomic updates per row, document, or graph entity

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.

caching of (temporary) tables can be configured

User concepts

Access control

Users and groups

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

Azure Active Directory Authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Cell-level Security, Data-Centric Security, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC)

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