DBMS > 4D vs. IBM Cloudant vs. PostgreSQL vs. RRDtool vs. SwayDB

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. IBM Cloudant vs. PostgreSQL vs. RRDtool vs. SwayDB

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

Widely used open source RDBMS

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

Industry standard data logging and graphing tool for time series data. RRD is an acronym for round-robin database.

The data is stored in a circular buffer, thus the system storage footprint remains constant over time.

An embeddable, non-blocking, type-safe key-value store for single or multiple disks and in-memory storage

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

Relational DBMS

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

Time Series DBMS

Key-value store

Secondary database models

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	2.47
Rank	#110	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	2.75
Rank	#104	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Score	636.25
Rank	#4	Overall
	#4	Relational DBMS

Score	1.90
Rank	#132	Overall
	#11	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.04
Rank	#387	Overall
	#61	Key-value stores

Website

www.4d.com

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

www.postgresql.org

oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool

swaydb.simer.au

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

www.postgresql.org/docs

oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/doc

Developer

4D, Inc

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

PostgreSQL Global Development Group

www.postgresql.org/developer

Tobias Oetiker

Simer Plaha

Initial release

1984

2010

1989

1989: Postgres, 1996: PostgreSQL

1999

2018

Current release

v20, April 2023

16.3, May 2024

1.8.0, 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

BSD

Open Source

GPL V2 and FLOSS

Open Source

GNU Affero GPL V3.0

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.

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Implementation language

Erlang

Implementations in Java (e.g. RRD4J) and C# available

Scala

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

hosted

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

HP-UX
Linux

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Numeric data only

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.

Exporting into and restoring from XML files possible

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

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

in-process shared library
Pipes

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

with librrd library
C#

with a different implementation of RRDTool
Java

with a different implementation of RRDTool
JavaScript (Node.js)

with a different implementation of RRDTool
Lua
Perl
PHP

with a wrapper library
Python
Ruby

Java
Kotlin
Scala

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

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

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

none

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

none

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

Atomic execution of operations

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

yes

by using the rrdcached daemon

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

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