DBMS > 4D vs. CouchDB vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. PouchDB vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. CouchDB vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. PouchDB vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

A native JSON - document store inspired by Lotus Notes, scalable from globally distributed server-clusters down to mobile phones.

Database as a Service offering with high compatibility to Microsoft SQL Server

JavaScript DBMS with an API inspired by CouchDB

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.37
Rank	#110	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	7.46
Rank	#51	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	72.95
Rank	#16	Overall
	#11	Relational DBMS

Score	2.18
Rank	#114	Overall
	#21	Document stores

Score	133.72
Rank	#7	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

couchdb.apache.org

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/azure-sql/database

pouchdb.com

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql

pouchdb.com/guides

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

4D, Inc

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Damien Katz, a former Lotus Notes developer

Microsoft

Apache Software Foundation

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

1984

2005

2010

2012

2014

Current release

v20, April 2023

3.3.3, December 2023

V12

7.1.1, June 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

Erlang

C++

JavaScript

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

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

Secondary indexes

yes

via views

yes

via views

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

yes

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

HTTP REST

only for PouchDB Server
JavaScript API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

C
C#
ColdFusion
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
Ruby
Smalltalk

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

JavaScript

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

View functions in JavaScript

Transact SQL

View functions in JavaScript

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

Sharding

with a proxy-based framework, named couchdb-lounge

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes, with always 3 replicas available

Multi-source replication

also with CouchDB databases
Source-replica replication

also with CouchDB databases

yes

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

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

atomic operations within a single document possible

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using IndexedDB, WebSQL or LevelDB as backend

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 rights for users can be defined per database

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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