DBMS > 4D vs. Fauna vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. ObjectBox

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Fauna vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. ObjectBox

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

Fauna provides a web-native interface, with support for GraphQL and custom business logic that integrates seamlessly with the rest of the serverless ecosystem. The underlying globally distributed storage and compute platform is fast, consistent, and reliable, with a modern security infrastructure.

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.

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Extremely fast embedded database for small devices, IoT and Mobile

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Relational DBMS
Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

Object oriented DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Time Series DBMS

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

Score	2.58
Rank	#108	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	1.52
Rank	#153	Overall
	#26	Document stores
	#14	Graph DBMS
	#71	Relational DBMS
	#13	Time Series DBMS

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	1.20
Rank	#170	Overall
	#5	Object oriented DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

fauna.com

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

objectbox.io

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

docs.fauna.com

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

docs.objectbox.io

Developer

4D, Inc

Fauna, Inc.

Google

Microsoft

ObjectBox Limited

Initial release

1984

2014

2017

1989

2017

Current release

v20, April 2023

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache License 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

Scala

C++

C and C++

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
Windows

Android
iOS
Linux
macOS
Windows

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

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

RESTful HTTP API

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
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

Proprietary native API

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

C#
Go
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby
Scala
Swift

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

C
C++
Dart
Go
Java
JavaScript

planned (as of Jan 2019)
Kotlin
Python

planned (as of Jan 2019)
Swift

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

horizontal partitioning

consistent hashing

Sharding

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

online/offline synchronization between client and server

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

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

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

User concepts

Access control

Users and groups

Identity management, authentication, and 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

yes

More information provided by the system vendor

News

Edge AI: The era of on-device AI
23 April 2024

In-Memory Database Use Cases
15 February 2024

Data Viewer for Objects – announcing ObjectBox Admin
14 November 2023

Vector Databases for Edge AI
9 August 2023

Vector Database Release for Flutter / Dart + Python
13 June 2023

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