DBMS > 4D vs. Couchbase vs. MariaDB vs. Oracle NoSQL vs. PlanetScale

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Couchbase vs. MariaDB vs. Oracle NoSQL vs. PlanetScale

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

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

MySQL application compatible open source RDBMS, enhanced with high availability, security, interoperability and performance capabilities. MariaDB ColumnStore provides a column-oriented storage engine and MariaDB Xpand supports distributed SQL.

A multi-model, scalable, distributed NoSQL database, designed to provide highly reliable, flexible, and available data management across a configurable set of storage nodes

Scalable, distributed, serverless MySQL database platform built on top of Vitess

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

Relational DBMS

Document store
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

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

Document store
Graph DBMS

with OQGraph storage engine
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.47
Rank	#110	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	16.59
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	91.04
Rank	#13	Overall
	#9	Relational DBMS

Score	3.05
Rank	#97	Overall
	#17	Document stores
	#16	Key-value stores
	#50	Relational DBMS

Score	1.49
Rank	#155	Overall
	#72	Relational DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

www.couchbase.com

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

www.oracle.com/database/nosql/technologies/nosql

planetscale.com

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

docs.couchbase.com

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

docs.oracle.com/en/database/other-databases/nosql-database/index.html

planetscale.com/docs

Developer

4D, Inc

Couchbase, Inc.

MariaDB Corporation Ab (MariaDB Enterprise),
MariaDB Foundation (community MariaDB Server)

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

Oracle

PlanetScale

Initial release

1984

2011

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

2011

2020

Current release

v20, April 2023

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

11.3.2, February 2024

23.3, December 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

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

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription available

Open Source

Proprietary for Enterprise Edition (Oracle Database EE license has Oracle NoSQL database EE covered: details)

commercial

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.

STACKIT MariaDB offers MariaDB in a fully managed version in enterprise grade, 100% GDPR-compliant.

Implementation language

C, C++, Go and Erlang

C and C++

Java

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

Linux
Solaris SPARC/x86

Docker
Linux
macOS

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

Support Fixed schema and Schema-less deployment with the ability to interoperate between them.

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

optional

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

with proprietary extensions

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

with proprietary extensions

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
MySQL protocol
ODBC

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Eiffel
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

C
C#
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

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

yes

PL/SQL compatibility added with version 10.3

yes

proprietary syntax

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Automatic Sharding

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Electable source-replica replication per shard. Support distributed global deployment with Multi-region table feature

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

with Hadoop integration

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

depending on configuration

Eventual Consistency across shards
Immediate Consistency within a shard

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

configurable

ACID within a storage node (=shard)

ACID at shard level

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

not for in-memory storage engine

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

Ephemeral buckets

yes

with MEMORY storage engine

yes

off heap cache

yes

User concepts

Access control

Users and groups

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights for users and roles

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

MariaDB is the most powerful open source relational database – modern SQL and JSON...
» more

Competitive advantages

MariaDB Servers have many features unavailable in other open source relational databases....
» more

Typical application scenarios

Web, SaaS and Cloud operational applications that require high availability, scalability...
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Key customers

Deutsche Bank, DBS Bank, Nasdaq, Red Hat, ServiceNow, Verizon and Walgreens Featured...
» more

Market metrics

MariaDB is the default database in the LAMP stack supplied by Red Hat and SUSE Linux,...
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Licensing and pricing models

MariaDB plc subscriptions cover our free, open source database, Community Server,...
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