DBMS > 4D vs. Faircom DB vs. Informix vs. RocksDB vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Faircom DB vs. Informix vs. RocksDB vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

Native high-speed multi-model DBMS for relational and key-value store data simultaneously accessible through SQL and NoSQL APIs.

A secure embeddable database from IBM, positioned besides IBM Db2 as a relatively low-cost product optimized for OLTP and Internet of Things data

Embeddable persistent key-value store optimized for fast storage (flash and RAM)

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

Since Version 12.10 support for JSON/BSON datatypes compatible with MongoDB

Key-value store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

with Informix TimeSeries Extension

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

Score	2.47
Rank	#110	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	0.29
Rank	#304	Overall
	#43	Key-value stores
	#136	Relational DBMS

Score	17.12
Rank	#34	Overall
	#21	Relational DBMS

Score	3.41
Rank	#86	Overall
	#11	Key-value stores

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

www.faircom.com/products/faircom-db

www.ibm.com/products/informix

rocksdb.org

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

docs.faircom.com/docs/en/UUID-7446ae34-a1a7-c843-c894-d5322e395184.html

informix.hcldoc.com
www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSGU8G/welcomeIfxServers.html

github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

4D, Inc

FairCom Corporation

IBM, HCL Technologies

Effective May 1st, 2017, HCL took on development, technical support, and product management teams, and works jointly with IBM on product strategy, marketing, and sales.

Facebook, Inc.

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

1984

1979

1984

2013

2014

Current release

v20, April 2023

V12, November 2020

14.10.FC5, November 2020

9.2.1, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Restricted, free version available

commercial

free developer edition available

Open Source

BSD

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.

Implementation language

ANSI C, C++

C, C++ and Java

C++

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
QNX
SCO
Solaris
VxWorks
Windows

easily portable to other OSs

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

Linux

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema free, schema optional, schema required, partial schema,

yes

schema-free

yes

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

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes, ANSI SQL Types, JSON, typed binary structures

yes

Since Version 12.10 support for JSON/BSON datatypes

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

yes, ANSI SQL with proprietary extensions

yes

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

ADO.NET
Direct SQL
JDBC
JPA
ODBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON API
RESTful MQTT/JSON API
RPC

JDBC
JSON API

MongoDB compatible
MQTT (Message Queue Telemetry Transport)
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

C++ API
Java API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

.Net
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js and browser)
PHP
Python
Visual Basic

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

C
C++
Go
Java
Perl
Python
Ruby

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

.Net, JavaScript, C/C++

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

File partitioning, horizontal partitioning, sharding

Customizable business rules for table partitioning

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

yes, configurable to be parallel or serial, synchronous or asynchronous, uni-directional or bi-directional, ACID-consistent or eventually consistent (with custom conflict resolution).

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Tunable consistency per server, database, table, and transaction

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

tunable from ACID to Eventually Consistent

ACID

yes

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Yes, tunable from durable to delayed durability to in-memory

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

Fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard with additional protections for files

Users with fine-grained authentication, authorization, and auditing controls

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

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