DBMS > 4D vs. FileMaker vs. SQLite

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. FileMaker vs. SQLite

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.

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

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	114.32
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

www.claris.com/filemaker

www.sqlite.org

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

www.claris.com/resources/documentation

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

Developer

4D, Inc

Claris

a subsidiary of Apple

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Initial release

1984

1983

2000

Current release

v20, April 2023

19.4.1, November 2021

3.45.3 (15 April 2024), April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Public Domain

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.

Implementation language

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

iOS

client part only
Linux
OS X
Windows

server-less

Data scheme

yes

dynamic column types

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

yes

via plugins

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

Filemaker WebDirect
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

PHP

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

Source-replica replication, warm standby

since Version 14

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

via file-system locks

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

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

More information provided by the system vendor

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.