DBMS > 4D vs. H2 vs. ObjectBox vs. TimescaleDB vs. XTDB

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. H2 vs. ObjectBox vs. TimescaleDB vs. XTDB

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

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

A general purpose database with bitemporal SQL and Datalog and graph queries

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Object oriented DBMS
Vector DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Document store

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Relational 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	4.06
Rank	#73	Overall
	#5	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.13
Rank	#330	Overall
	#45	Document stores

Website

www.4d.com

www.h2database.com

github.com/objectbox
objectbox.io

www.timescale.com

github.com/xtdb/xtdb
www.xtdb.com

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

docs.objectbox.io

docs.timescale.com

www.xtdb.com/docs

Developer

4D, Inc

Thomas Mueller

ObjectBox Limited

Timescale

Juxt Ltd.

Initial release

1984

2005

2017

2019

Current release

v20, April 2023

2.2.220, July 2023

4.0 (May 2024)

2.15.0, May 2024

1.19, September 2021

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

Apache 2.0

Open Source

MIT License

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++

Clojure

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

Android
Any POSIX system
Docker
iOS
Linux
macOS
QNX
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java 8 (and higher) VM
Linux

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes, plus "flex" map-like types

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

yes, extensible-data-notation format

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

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

limited SQL, making use of Apache Calcite

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary native API

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

HTTP REST
JDBC

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

Java

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

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Clojure
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Java Stored Procedures and User-Defined Functions

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

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

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

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

yes, each node contains all data

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate 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

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, flexibel persistency by using storage technologies like Apache Kafka, RocksDB or LMDB

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

DB-Engines blog posts

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

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Recent citations in the news

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