DBMS > 4D vs. BigObject vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. XTDB

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. BigObject vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. XTDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

Analytic DBMS for real-time computations and queries

Cloud-hosted realtime document store. iOS, Android, and JavaScript clients share one Realtime Database instance and automatically receive updates with the newest data.

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

A general purpose database with bitemporal SQL and Datalog and graph queries

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

a hierachical model (tree) can be imposed

Document store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Document store

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.47
Rank	#110	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	0.19
Rank	#329	Overall
	#146	Relational DBMS

Score	13.64
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	27.71
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	0.18
Rank	#332	Overall
	#46	Document stores

Website

www.4d.com

bigobject.io

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

github.com/xtdb/xtdb
www.xtdb.com

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

docs.bigobject.io

firebase.google.com/docs/database

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

www.xtdb.com/docs

Developer

4D, Inc

BigObject, Inc.

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Microsoft

Juxt Ltd.

Initial release

1984

2015

2012

2014

2019

Current release

v20, April 2023

1.19, September 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free community edition available

commercial

Open Source

MIT License

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

Clojure

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

Linux

distributed as a docker-image
OS X

distributed as a docker-image (boot2docker)
Windows

distributed as a docker-image (boot2docker)

hosted

All OS with a Java 8 (and higher) VM
Linux

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

yes, extensible-data-notation format

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 properties auto-indexed by default

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

SQL-like query language

limited SQL, making use of Apache Calcite

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

fluentd
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

HTTP REST
JDBC

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

Clojure
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Lua

limited functionality with using 'rules'

JavaScript

Triggers

yes

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

JavaScript

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

none

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes, each node contains all data

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

none

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

automatically between fact table and dimension tables

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

yes

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Read/write lock on objects (tables, trees)

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, flexibel persistency by using storage technologies like Apache Kafka, RocksDB or LMDB

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

yes, based on authentication and database rules

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

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