DBMS > 4D vs. Couchbase vs. DuckDB vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Trafodion

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Couchbase vs. DuckDB vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Trafodion

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Apache Trafodion has been retired in 2021. Therefore it is excluded from the DB-Engines Ranking.

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

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

An embeddable, in-process, column-oriented SQL OLAP RDBMS

A horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service. It is the externalization of the core Google database that runs the biggest aspects of Google, like Ads and Google Play.

Transactional SQL-on-Hadoop DBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

Relational DBMS

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

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

Score	2.58
Rank	#108	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	4.57
Rank	#74	Overall
	#40	Relational DBMS

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

www.couchbase.com

duckdb.org

cloud.google.com/spanner

trafodion.apache.org

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

docs.couchbase.com

duckdb.org/docs

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

trafodion.apache.org/documentation.html

Developer

4D, Inc

Couchbase, Inc.

Google

Apache Software Foundation, originally developed by HP

Initial release

1984

2011

2018

2017

2014

Current release

v20, April 2023

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

0.10, February 2024

2.3.0, February 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

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

Open Source

MIT License

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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

C, C++, Go and Erlang

C++

C++, Java

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

server-less

hosted

Linux

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

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

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

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

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

Arrow Database Connectivity (ADBC)
CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C
C#

3rd party driver
C++
Crystal

3rd party driver
Go

3rd party driver
Java
Lisp

3rd party driver
Python
R
Ruby

3rd party driver
Rust
Swift
Zig

3rd party driver

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/ADO.Net

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

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

Java Stored Procedures

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Automatic Sharding

none

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

none

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

yes, via HBase

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

yes

via user defined functions and HBase

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

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

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

Ephemeral buckets

yes

User concepts

Access control

Users and groups

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

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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