DBMS > 4D vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. GridDB

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. GridDB

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

Cloud-hosted realtime document store. iOS, Android, and JavaScript clients share one Realtime Database instance and automatically receive updates with the newest data.

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.

Scalable in-memory time series database optimized for IoT and Big Data

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Key-value store
Relational DBMS

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

Score	2.58
Rank	#108	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	1.95
Rank	#128	Overall
	#10	Time Series DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

cloud.google.com/spanner

griddb.net

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

firebase.google.com/docs/database

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

docs.griddb.net

Developer

4D, Inc

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Google

Toshiba Corporation

Initial release

1984

2012

2017

2013

Current release

v20, April 2023

5.1, August 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

AGPL version 3 and Apache License, version 2.0 , commercial license (standard and advanced editions) also available

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++

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

numerical, string, blob, geometry, boolean, timestamp

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

SQL92, SQL-like TQL (Toshiba Query Language)

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
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

JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

limited functionality with using 'rules'

Triggers

yes

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Connector for using GridDB as an input source and output destination for Hadoop MapReduce jobs

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Immediate Consistency

Immediate consistency within container, eventual consistency across containers

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integrity

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

yes

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID at container level

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

yes, based on authentication and database rules

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Access rights for users can be defined per database

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

GridDB is a highly scalable, in-memory time series database optimized for IoT and...
» more

Competitive advantages

1. Optimized for IoT Equipped with Toshiba's proprietary key-container data model...
» more

Typical application scenarios

Factory IoT, Automative Industry, Energy, BEMS, Smart Community, Monitoring system.
» more

Key customers

Denso International [see use case ] An Electric Power company [see use case ] Ishinomaki...
» more

Market metrics

GitHub trending repository
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Open Source license (AGPL v3 & Apache v2) Commercial license (subscription)
» more

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.

Related products and services

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More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

MySQL, PostgreSQL and Redis are the winners of the March ranking
2 March 2016, Paul Andlinger

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Cloud-based DBMS's popularity grows at high rates
12 December 2019, Paul Andlinger

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Recent citations in the news

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Google Spanner: When Do You Need to Move to It?
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General Availability of GridDB 5.1 Enterprise Edition ~ Continuous database usage in the event of data center failure ...
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