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

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

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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.

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

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.58
Rank	#108	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	0.20
Rank	#318	Overall
	#48	Key-value stores
	#141	Relational DBMS

Score	48.20
Rank	#20	Overall
	#14	Relational DBMS

Score	29.04
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Website

www.4d.com

www.faircom.com/products/faircom-db

www.claris.com/filemaker

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

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

www.claris.com/resources/documentation

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

Developer

4D, Inc

FairCom Corporation

Claris

a subsidiary of Apple

Microsoft

Initial release

1984

1979

1983

2014

Current release

v20, April 2023

V12, November 2020

19.4.1, November 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Restricted, free version available

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++

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

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

easily portable to other OSs

iOS

client part only
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

yes

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

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes, ANSI SQL Types, JSON, typed binary structures

yes

JSON 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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

yes, ANSI SQL with proprietary extensions

yes

via plugins

SQL-like query language

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

Filemaker WebDirect
JDBC
ODBC

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

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

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

PHP

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

.Net, JavaScript, C/C++

yes

JavaScript

Triggers

yes

JavaScript

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

File partitioning, horizontal partitioning, sharding

Customizable business rules for table partitioning

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

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).

Source-replica replication, warm standby

since Version 14

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

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

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

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session 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

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

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

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

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

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