DBMS > 4D vs. EXASOL vs. TimescaleDB vs. Weaviate vs. XTDB

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. EXASOL vs. TimescaleDB vs. Weaviate vs. XTDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

High-performance, in-memory, MPP database specifically designed for in-memory analytics.

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

An AI-native realtime vector database engine that integrates scalable machine learning models.

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

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Relational DBMS

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

Score	2.47
Rank	#110	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	1.76
Rank	#139	Overall
	#62	Relational DBMS

Score	4.46
Rank	#71	Overall
	#5	Time Series DBMS

Score	1.52
Rank	#153	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Score	0.18
Rank	#332	Overall
	#46	Document stores

Website

www.4d.com

www.exasol.com

www.timescale.com

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

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

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

www.exasol.com/resources

docs.timescale.com

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

www.xtdb.com/docs

Developer

4D, Inc

Exasol

Timescale

Weaviate B.V.

Juxt Ltd.

Initial release

1984

2000

2017

2019

Current release

v20, April 2023

2.15.0, May 2024

1.19, May 2023

1.19, September 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate Enterprise

Open Source

MIT License

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

Clojure

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

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

Data scheme

yes

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

yes

string, int, float, geo point, date, cross reference, fuzzy references

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 data objects are indexed in a semantic vector space (the Contextionary), all primitive fields are indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

GraphQL is used as query language

limited SQL, making use of Apache Calcite

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

.Net
JDBC
ODBC
WebSocket

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

HTTP REST
JDBC

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

Java
Lua
Python
R

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Clojure
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

yes

yes, each node contains all data

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Hadoop integration

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

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

Access rights for users, groups and roles according to SQL-standard

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
» more

Competitive advantages

Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
» more

Typical application scenarios

As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
» more

Key customers

All companies that have data.
» more

Market metrics

As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
» more

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.

Related products and services

We invite representatives of vendors of related products to contact us for presenting information about their offerings here.

More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

MySQL, PostgreSQL and Redis are the winners of the March ranking
2 March 2016, Paul Andlinger

show all

Weaviate, an ANN Database with CRUD support
2 February 2021, Etienne Dilocker, SeMI Technologies (sponsor)

show all

Recent citations in the news

It's Back to the Database Future for Exasol CEO Tewes
26 October 2023, Datanami

Exasol Finds AI Underinvestment Leads to Business Failure, But Data Challenges Stall Rapid Adoption
20 March 2024, businesswire.com

Exasol gets jolt of AI with Espresso suite of capabilities
26 February 2024, TechTarget

Mathias Golombek, Chief Technology Officer of Exasol – Interview Series
21 May 2024, Unite.AI

Exasol Unveils New Suite of AI Tools to Turbocharge Enterprise Data Analytics
22 February 2024, AiThority

provided by Google News

TimescaleDB Is a Vector Database Now, Too
25 September 2023, Datanami

Timescale Acquires PopSQL to Bring a Modern, Collaborative SQL GUI to PostgreSQL Developers
4 April 2024, PR Newswire

Power IoT and time-series workloads with TimescaleDB for Azure Database for PostgreSQL
18 March 2019, Microsoft

Timescale Valuation Rockets to Over $1B with $110M Round, Marking the Explosive Rise of Time-Series Data
22 February 2022, Business Wire

Timescale announces $15M investment and new enterprise version of TimescaleDB
29 January 2019, TechCrunch

provided by Google News

Build enterprise-ready generative AI solutions with Cohere foundation models in Amazon Bedrock and Weaviate vector ...
24 January 2024, AWS Blog

Weaviate Partners with Snowflake to Bring Secure GenAI to Snowpark Container Services
8 February 2024, Datanami

Weaviate Partners with Snowflake to Bring Secure GenAI to Snowpark Container Services
9 February 2024, AiThority

Foley Represents Cortical Ventures in $50M Series B Round for Weaviate
17 December 2023, Foley & Lardner LLP

Getting Started with Weaviate: A Beginner's Guide to Search with Vector Databases
18 July 2023, Towards Data Science

provided by Google News

Share this page