DBMS > 4D vs. FileMaker vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. ObjectBox

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. FileMaker vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. ObjectBox

Please select another system to include it in the comparison.

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

FileMaker is a cross-platform RDBMS that includes a GUI frontend.

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Lightweight, fast on-device database for IoT, Mobile and Embedded devices, persisting and synchronising objects and vectors

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Object oriented DBMS
Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Time Series DBMS

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

Score	2.47
Rank	#110	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	47.91
Rank	#20	Overall
	#14	Relational DBMS

Score	27.71
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	1.29
Rank	#166	Overall
	#5	Object oriented DBMS
	#7	Vector DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

www.claris.com/filemaker

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

github.com/objectbox
objectbox.io

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

www.claris.com/resources/documentation

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

docs.objectbox.io

Developer

4D, Inc

Claris

a subsidiary of Apple

Microsoft

ObjectBox Limited

Initial release

1984

1983

2014

2017

Current release

v20, April 2023

19.4.1, November 2021

4.0 (May 2024)

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Bindings are released under Apache 2.0

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

C and C++

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

iOS

client part only
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Android
Any POSIX system
Docker
iOS
Linux
macOS
QNX
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

yes, plus "flex" map-like types

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

A http query request can return the data in XML format

Secondary indexes

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

yes

via plugins

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

Filemaker WebDirect
JDBC
ODBC

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

Proprietary native API

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

PHP

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

C
C++
Dart (Flutter)
Go
Java
Kotlin
Python
Swift

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

JavaScript

Triggers

yes

JavaScript

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

Source-replica replication, warm standby

since Version 14

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Data sync between devices allowing occasional connected databases to work completely offline

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

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.

User concepts

Access control

Users and groups

simple rights management via user accounts and connection to external directory services

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

yes

More information provided by the system vendor

News

The on-device Vector Database for Android and Java
29 May 2024

Vector search: making sense of search queries
29 May 2024

Python on-device Vector and Object Database for Local AI
28 May 2024

Evolution of search: traditional vs vector search
23 May 2024

On-device Vector Database for Dart/Flutter
21 May 2024

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.