DBMS > 4D vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. MySQL

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. MySQL

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

Cloud Firestore is an auto-scaling document database for storing, syncing, and querying data for mobile and web apps. It offers seamless integration with other Firebase and Google Cloud Platform products.

A high performance, column-oriented RDBMS, specifically developed to harness the massive parallelism of modern CPU and GPU hardware

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Widely used open source RDBMS

Primary database model

column oriented

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Document store

If a column is of type dynamic docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/scalar-data-types/dynamic then it's possible to add arbitrary JSON documents in this cell
Event Store

this is the general usage pattern at Microsoft. Billing, Logs, Telemetry events are stored in ADX and the state of an individual entity is defined by the arg_max(timestamps)
Spatial DBMS
Search engine

support for complex search expressions docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/parseoperator FTS, Geospatial docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/geo-point-to-geohash-function distributed search -> ADX acts as a distributed search engine
Time Series DBMS

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer/time-series-analysis

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.47
Rank	#110	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	7.36
Rank	#53	Overall
	#9	Document stores

Score	1.64
Rank	#145	Overall
	#67	Relational DBMS

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	1061.34
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

firebase.google.com/products/firestore

github.com/heavyai/heavydb
www.heavy.ai

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.mysql.com

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

firebase.google.com/docs/firestore

docs.heavy.ai

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer

dev.mysql.com/doc

Developer

4D, Inc

Google

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

Microsoft

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Initial release

1984

2017

2016

2019

1995

Current release

v20, April 2023

5.10, January 2022

cloud service with continuous releases

8.4.0, April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are 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.

Aiven for MySQL: Fully managed MySQL, deployable in the cloud of your choice, with seamless integrations and lightning-fast setup.

Implementation language

C++ and CUDA

C and C++

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

bool, datetime, dynamic, guid, int, long, real, string, timespan, double: docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/scalar-data-types

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

Secondary indexes

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

yes

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

with proprietary extensions

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

Android
gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

Microsoft SQL Server communication protocol (MS-TDS)
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

Go
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
Python

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

.Net
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PowerShell
Python
R

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

yes, Firebase Rules & Cloud Functions

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

yes

proprietary syntax

Triggers

yes

yes, with Cloud Functions

yes

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/management/updatepolicy

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Round robin

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service. Replication either local, cross-facility or geo-redundant.

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Using Cloud Dataflow

Spark connector (open source): github.com/Azure/azure-kusto-spark

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

yes

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

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

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management. Security Rules for 3rd party authentication using Firebase Auth.

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Azure Active Directory Authentication

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

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