DBMS > 4D vs. HEAVY.AI vs. IBM Cloudant vs. ObjectBox vs. PostgreSQL

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. HEAVY.AI vs. IBM Cloudant vs. ObjectBox vs. PostgreSQL

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

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

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Extremely fast embedded database for small devices, IoT and Mobile

Widely used open source RDBMS

Developed as objectoriented DBMS (Postgres), gradually enhanced with 'standards' like SQL

Primary database model

with object oriented extensions, e.g.: user defined types/functions and inheritance. Handling of key/value pairs with hstore module.

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

with Apache Age
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

with pgvector extension

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

Score	2.58
Rank	#108	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	1.77
Rank	#141	Overall
	#65	Relational DBMS

Score	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	1.20
Rank	#170	Overall
	#5	Object oriented DBMS

Score	645.54
Rank	#4	Overall
	#4	Relational DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

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

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

objectbox.io

www.postgresql.org

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

docs.heavy.ai

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

docs.objectbox.io

www.postgresql.org/docs

Developer

4D, Inc

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

ObjectBox Limited

PostgreSQL Global Development Group

www.postgresql.org/developer

Initial release

1984

2016

2010

2017

1989

1989: Postgres, 1996: PostgreSQL

Current release

v20, April 2023

5.10, January 2022

16.2, February 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

commercial

Open Source

Apache License 2.0

Open Source

BSD

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 PostgreSQL: Fully managed PostgreSQL for developers with 70+ extensions and flexible orchestration tools.

Implementation language

C++ and CUDA

Erlang

C and C++

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

Linux

hosted

Android
iOS
Linux
macOS
Windows

FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
NetBSD
OpenBSD
OS X
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

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

specific XML-type available, but no XML query functionality.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

yes

standard with numerous extensions

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Proprietary native API

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

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

C
C++
Dart
Go
Java
JavaScript

planned (as of Jan 2019)
Kotlin
Python

planned (as of Jan 2019)
Swift

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

user defined functions

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Round robin

Sharding

none

partitioning by range, list and (since PostgreSQL 11) by hash

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

online/offline synchronization between client and server

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

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

Optimistic locking

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

Access rights for users can be defined per database

yes

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

News

Edge AI: The era of on-device AI
23 April 2024

In-Memory Database Use Cases
15 February 2024

Data Viewer for Objects – announcing ObjectBox Admin
14 November 2023

Vector Databases for Edge AI
9 August 2023

Vector Database Release for Flutter / Dart + Python
13 June 2023

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.

Related products and services

3rd parties

Redgate webinars: A series of key topics for new PostgreSQL users.
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Timescale: Calling all PostgreSQL users – the 2023 State of PostgreSQL survey is now open! Share your favorite extensions, preferred frameworks, community experiences, and more. Take the survey today!
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CYBERTEC is your professional partner in PostgreSQL topics for over 20 years. As our main aim is to be your single-source all-in-one IT service provider, we offer a wide range of products and services. Visit our website for more details.
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Fujitsu Enterprise Postgres: An Enterprise Grade PostgreSQL with the flexibility of a hybrid cloud solution combined with industry leading security, availability and performance.
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SharePlex is the reliable and affordable data replication solution for PostgreSQL migrations, high availability and more.
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Navicat Monitor is a safe, simple and agentless remote server monitoring tool for PostgreSQL and many other database management systems.
» more

Instaclustr: Fully Hosted & Managed PostgreSQL
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Navicat for PostgreSQL is an easy-to-use graphical tool for PostgreSQL database development.
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pgDash: In-Depth PostgreSQL Monitoring.
» more

Aiven for PostgreSQL: Fully managed PostgreSQL for developers with 70+ extensions and flexible orchestration tools.
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We invite representatives of vendors of related products to contact us for presenting information about their offerings here.

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