DBMS > 4D vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. ObjectBox vs. Oracle Berkeley DB

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. ObjectBox vs. Oracle Berkeley DB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

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.

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Extremely fast embedded database for small devices, IoT and Mobile

Widely used in-process key-value store

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Object oriented DBMS

Key-value store

supports sorted and unsorted key sets
Native XML DBMS

in the Oracle Berkeley DB XML version

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Time Series DBMS

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

Score	2.47
Rank	#110	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	2.84
Rank	#100	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Score	27.71
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	1.29
Rank	#166	Overall
	#5	Object oriented DBMS

Score	2.01
Rank	#126	Overall
	#21	Key-value stores
	#3	Native XML DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

cloud.google.com/spanner

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

objectbox.io

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

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

docs.objectbox.io

docs.oracle.com/cd/E17076_05/html/index.html

Developer

4D, Inc

Google

Microsoft

ObjectBox Limited

Oracle

originally developed by Sleepycat, which was acquired by Oracle

Initial release

1984

2017

2014

2017

1994

Current release

v20, April 2023

18.1.40, May 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache License 2.0

Open Source

commercial license 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 and C++

C, Java, C++ (depending on the Berkeley DB edition)

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

hosted

Android
iOS
Linux
macOS
Windows

AIX
Android
FreeBSD
iOS
Linux
OS X
Solaris
VxWorks
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON 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

only with the Berkeley DB XML edition

Secondary indexes

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

SQL-like query language

yes

SQL interfaced based on SQLite is available

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

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

Proprietary native API

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

C
C++
Dart
Go
Java
JavaScript

planned (as of Jan 2019)
Kotlin
Python

planned (as of Jan 2019)
Swift

.Net

Figaro is a .Net framework assembly that extends Berkeley DB XML into an embeddable database engine for .NET
others

Third-party libraries to manipulate Berkeley DB files are available for many languages
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party binding
Perl
Python
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

JavaScript

Triggers

yes

JavaScript

yes

only for the SQL API

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

online/offline synchronization between client and server

Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

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

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

ACID

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

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

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

yes

More information provided by the system vendor

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