DBMS > 4D vs. H2 vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Lovefield vs. ObjectBox

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. H2 vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Lovefield vs. ObjectBox

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

Full-featured RDBMS with a small footprint, either embedded into a Java application or used as a database server.

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Embeddable relational database for web apps written in pure JavaScript

Lightweight, fast on-device database for IoT, Mobile and Embedded devices, persisting and synchronising objects and vectors

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

Relational DBMS

Object oriented DBMS
Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Time Series DBMS

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

Score	2.37
Rank	#110	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	7.57
Rank	#47	Overall
	#30	Relational DBMS

Score	2.85
Rank	#95	Overall
	#18	Document stores

Score	0.22
Rank	#306	Overall
	#138	Relational DBMS

Score	1.08
Rank	#179	Overall
	#6	Object oriented DBMS
	#9	Vector DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

www.h2database.com

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

google.github.io/lovefield

github.com/objectbox
objectbox.io

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

github.com/google/lovefield/blob/master/docs/spec_index.md

docs.objectbox.io

Developer

4D, Inc

Thomas Mueller

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Google

ObjectBox Limited

Initial release

1984

2005

2010

2014

2017

Current release

v20, April 2023

2.2.220, July 2023

2.1.12, February 2017

4.0 (May 2024)

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

dual-licence (Mozilla public license, Eclipse public license)

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Bindings are released under Apache 2.0

Apache License 2.0

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

Java

Erlang

JavaScript

C and C++

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

tested with Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari

Android
Any POSIX system
Docker
iOS
Linux
macOS
QNX
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes, plus "flex" map-like types

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

SQL-like query language

via JavaScript builder pattern

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Proprietary native API

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

Java

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

JavaScript

C
C++
Dart (Flutter)
Go
Java
Kotlin
Python
Swift

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Java Stored Procedures and User-Defined Functions

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

Triggers

yes

Using read-only observers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

With clustering: 2 database servers on different computers operate on identical copies of a database

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

Data sync between devices allowing occasional connected databases to work completely offline

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

yes

Optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, by using IndexedDB or the cloud service Firebase Realtime Database

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

using MemoryDB

User concepts

Access control

Users and groups

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights for users can be defined per database

yes

More information provided by the system vendor

News

MongoDB Realm & Device Sync alternatives – ObjectBox
17 September 2024

Local AI – what it is and why we need it
11 September 2024

First on-device Vector Database (aka Semantic Index) for iOS
24 July 2024

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) with vector databases: Expanding AI Capabilities
18 June 2024

The on-device Vector Database for Android and Java
29 May 2024

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

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More resources

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provided by Google News

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