DBMS > 4D vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. SAP SQL Anywhere vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. SAP SQL Anywhere vs. Weaviate

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

RDBMS database and synchronization technologies for server, desktop, remote office, and mobile environments

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.58
Rank	#108	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	29.04
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	4.25
Rank	#79	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	1.73
Rank	#143	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

www.sap.com/products/technology-platform/sql-anywhere.html

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

help.sap.com/docs/SAP_SQL_Anywhere

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

4D, Inc

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Microsoft

SAP

formerly Sybase

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

1984

2010

2014

1992

2019

Current release

v20, April 2023

17, July 2015

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate Enterprise

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

Erlang

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

hosted

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

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 properties auto-indexed by default

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

SQL-like query language

yes

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

ADO.NET
HTTP API
JDBC
ODBC

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

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

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

JavaScript

yes, in C/C++, Java, .Net or Perl

Triggers

yes

JavaScript

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Source-replica replication

Database mirroring

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Eventual 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

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

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

Access rights for users can be defined per database

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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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