DBMS > 4D vs. Apache Phoenix vs. Firebird vs. LeanXcale vs. PostgreSQL

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Apache Phoenix vs. Firebird vs. LeanXcale vs. PostgreSQL

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

A scale-out RDBMS with evolutionary schema built on Apache HBase

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

A highly scalable full ACID SQL database with fast NoSQL data ingestion and GIS capabilities

Widely used open source RDBMS

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Secondary database models

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	1.97
Rank	#126	Overall
	#59	Relational DBMS

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	0.29
Rank	#291	Overall
	#41	Key-value stores
	#132	Relational DBMS

Score	645.54
Rank	#4	Overall
	#4	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

phoenix.apache.org

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

www.postgresql.org/docs

Developer

4D, Inc

Apache Software Foundation

Firebird Foundation

LeanXcale

PostgreSQL Global Development Group

www.postgresql.org/developer

Initial release

1984

2014

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2015

1989

1989: Postgres, 1996: PostgreSQL

Current release

v20, April 2023

5.0-HBase2, July 2018 and 4.15-HBase1, December 2019

5.0.0, January 2024

16.3, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Open Source

BSD

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

Java

C and C++

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

Linux
Unix
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

Data scheme

yes

late-bound, schema-on-read capabilities

yes

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

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

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

yes

through Apache Derby

yes

standard with numerous extensions

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

JDBC

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

JDBC
Kafka Connector
ODBC
proprietary key/value interface
Spark Connector

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

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

C
C#
C++
Go
Groovy
Java
PHP
Python
Scala

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C
Java
Scala

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

PSQL

user defined functions

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

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

none

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

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

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Hadoop integration

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

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 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

Access Control Lists (using HBase ACL) for RBAC, integration with Apache Ranger for RBAC & ABAC, multi-tenancy

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

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