DBMS > 4D vs. FileMaker vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. TiDB vs. TimesTen

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. FileMaker vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. TiDB vs. TimesTen

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.

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

TiDB is an open source distributed SQL database that supports Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) workloads. It is MySQL compatible and features horizontal scalability, strong consistency, and high availability.

In-Memory RDBMS compatible to Oracle

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Document store

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

Score	2.58
Rank	#108	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	48.20
Rank	#20	Overall
	#14	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	4.66
Rank	#70	Overall
	#38	Relational DBMS

Score	1.31
Rank	#163	Overall
	#74	Relational DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

www.claris.com/filemaker

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

pingcap.com

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/timesten.html

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

www.claris.com/resources/documentation

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

docs.pingcap.com/tidb/stable

docs.oracle.com/database/timesten-18.1

Developer

4D, Inc

Claris

a subsidiary of Apple

Microsoft

PingCAP, Inc.

Oracle, TimesTen Performance Software, HP

originally founded in HP Labs it was acquired by Oracle in 2005

Initial release

1984

1983

1989

2016

1998

Current release

v20, April 2023

19.4.1, November 2021

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

8.0.0, March 2024

11 Release 2 (11.2.2.8.0)

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

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.

TiDB Cloud: Fully-managed TiDB Service. Bring everything great about TiDB to the cloud.

Implementation language

C++

Go, Rust

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

iOS

client part only
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
Windows

Linux

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris SPARC/x86
Windows

Data scheme

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

A http query request can return the data in XML format

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

yes

via plugins

yes

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

Filemaker WebDirect
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

GORM
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
SQLAlchemy

JDBC
ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

PHP

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

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

C
C++
Java
PL/SQL

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

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

PL/SQL

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

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

horizontal partitioning (by key range)

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

Source-replica replication, warm standby

since Version 14

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Using Raft consensus algorithm to ensure data replication with strong consistency among multiple replicas.

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

with TiSpark Connector

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

full support since version 6.6

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

by means of logfiles and checkpoints

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

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

TiDB is an advanced open-source, distributed SQL database for modern application...
» more

Competitive advantages

- HORIZONTAL SCALING : TiDB grants total transparency into your data workloads without...
» more

Typical application scenarios

TiDB is ideal for transactional applications that require extreme scalability and...
» more

Key customers

Block, Pinterest, Catalyst, Bolt, Flipkart, Capcom, Shopee (E-commerce), JD Cloud...
» more

Market metrics

34K+ GitHub stars 5K+ members in TiDB Community Slack 1K+ community contributors...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

TiDB Community : Free open source software (Apache 2.0) TiDB Self-Hosted : Enterprise...
» more

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and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.