DBMS > 4D vs. H2 vs. ObjectBox vs. SQLite vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. H2 vs. ObjectBox vs. SQLite vs. Weaviate

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.

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

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

An AI-native realtime vector database engine that integrates scalable machine learning models.

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Object oriented DBMS
Vector DBMS

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

Score	103.35
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Score	1.48
Rank	#149	Overall
	#8	Vector DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

www.h2database.com

github.com/objectbox
objectbox.io

www.sqlite.org

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

docs.objectbox.io

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

4D, Inc

Thomas Mueller

ObjectBox Limited

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

1984

2005

2017

2000

2019

Current release

v20, April 2023

2.2.220, July 2023

4.0 (May 2024)

3.46.1 (13 August 2024), August 2024

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

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

Bindings are released under Apache 2.0

Apache License 2.0

Open Source

Public Domain

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate Enterprise

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

Java

C and C++

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

Android
Any POSIX system
Docker
iOS
Linux
macOS
QNX
Windows

server-less

Data scheme

yes

dynamic column types

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes, plus "flex" map-like types

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

yes

string, int, float, geo point, date, cross reference, fuzzy references

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 data objects are indexed in a semantic vector space (the Contextionary), all primitive fields are indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary native API

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

Java

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

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

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Java Stored Procedures and User-Defined Functions

Triggers

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

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

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

none

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual 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

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

yes

via file-system locks

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
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Competitive advantages

Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
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Typical application scenarios

As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
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Key customers

All companies that have data.
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Market metrics

As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
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Licensing and pricing models

Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
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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.