DBMS > 4D vs. BaseX vs. Couchbase vs. HarperDB vs. RethinkDB

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. BaseX vs. Couchbase vs. HarperDB vs. RethinkDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

Light-weight Native XML DBMS with support for XQuery 3.0 and interactive GUI.

A distributed document store with integrated cache, a powerful search engine, in-built operational and analytical capabilities, and an embedded mobile database

Ultra-low latency distributed database with an intuitive REST API supporting NoSQL and SQL (including joins). Deployment of functions and databases simultaneously with a consolidated node-level architecture.

DBMS for the Web with a mechanism to push updated query results to applications in realtime.

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Native XML DBMS

Document store

Secondary database models

Key-value store

originating from the former Membase product and supporting the Memcached protocol
Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.58
Rank	#108	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	1.73
Rank	#142	Overall
	#4	Native XML DBMS

Score	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	0.55
Rank	#248	Overall
	#38	Document stores

Score	2.74
Rank	#105	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Website

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

docs.basex.org

docs.couchbase.com

docs.harperdb.io/docs

rethinkdb.com/docs

Developer

4D, Inc

BaseX GmbH

Couchbase, Inc.

HarperDB

The Linux Foundation

since July 2017

Initial release

1984

2007

2011

2017

2009

Current release

v20, April 2023

10.7, August 2023

Server: 7.2, June 2023; Mobile: 3.1, March 2022; Couchbase Capella (DBaaS), June 2023

3.1, August 2021

2.4.1, August 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

BSD license

Open Source

Business Source License (BSL 1.1); Commercial licenses also available

commercial

free community edition available

Open Source

Apache Version 2

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.

Implementation language

Java

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Node.js

C++

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
OS X

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

dynamic schema

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

XQuery supports types

yes

JSON data types

yes

string, binary, float, bool, date, geometry

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

SQL++, extends ANSI SQL to JSON for operational, transactional, and analytic use cases

SQL-like data manipulation statements

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

Java API
RESTful HTTP API
RESTXQ
WebDAV
XML:DB
XQJ

CLI Client
HTTP REST
Kafka Connector
Native language bindings for CRUD, Query, Search and Analytics APIs
Spark Connector
Spring Data

JDBC
ODBC
React Hooks
RESTful HTTP/JSON API
WebSocket

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

Actionscript
C
C#
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lisp
Perl
PHP
Python
Qt
Rebol
Ruby
Scala
Visual Basic

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
C
C#
C++
ColdFusion
D
Dart
Delphi
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lisp
MatLab
Objective C
Perl
PHP
PowerShell
Prolog
Python
R
Ruby
Rust
Scala
Swift

community-supported driver
C#

community-supported driver
C++

community-supported driver
Clojure

community-supported driver
Dart

community-supported driver
Erlang

community-supported driver
Go

community-supported driver
Haskell

community-supported driver
Java

official driver
JavaScript (Node.js)

official driver
Lisp

community-supported driver
Lua

community-supported driver
Objective-C

community-supported driver
Perl

community-supported driver
PHP

community-supported driver
Python

official driver
Ruby

official driver
Scala

community-supported driver

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Functions and timers in JavaScript and UDFs in Java, Python, SQL++

Custom Functions

since release 3.1

Triggers

yes

via events

yes

via the TAP protocol

Client-side triggers through changefeeds

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Automatic Sharding

A table resides as a whole on one (or more) nodes in a cluster

Sharding

range based

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

none

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

yes

the nodes on which a table resides can be defined

Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

multiple readers, single writer

ACID

Atomic execution of specific operations

Atomic single-document operations

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

MVCC based

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, using LMDB

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

Ephemeral buckets

yes

User concepts

Access control

Users and groups

Users with fine-grained authorization concept on 4 levels

User and Administrator separation with password-based and LDAP integrated Authentication. Role-base access control.

Access rights for users and roles

yes

users and table-level permissions

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