DBMS > 4D vs. IBM Db2 vs. Microsoft Access vs. Snowflake vs. TerarkDB

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. IBM Db2 vs. Microsoft Access vs. Snowflake vs. TerarkDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

Common in IBM host environments, 2 different versions for host and Windows/Linux

Microsoft Access combines a backend RDBMS (JET / ACE Engine) with a GUI frontend for data manipulation and queries.

The Access frontend is often used for accessing other datasources (DBMS, Excel, etc.)

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

A key-value store forked from RocksDB with advanced compression algorithms. It can be used standalone or as a storage engine for MySQL and MongoDB

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Since Version 10.5 support for JSON/BSON documents compatible with MongoDB

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

Secondary database models

Document store
RDF store

in Db2 LUW (Linux, Unix, Windows)
Spatial DBMS

with Db2 Spatial Extender

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

Score	2.47
Rank	#110	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	125.90
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	101.16
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	0.08
Rank	#367	Overall
	#56	Key-value stores

Website

www.4d.com

www.ibm.com/products/db2

www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/access

www.snowflake.com

github.com/bytedance/terarkdb

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

www.ibm.com/docs/en/db2

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

bytedance.larkoffice.com/docs/doccnZmYFqHBm06BbvYgjsHHcKc

Developer

4D, Inc

IBM

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

ByteDance, originally Terark

Initial release

1984

1983

host version

1992

2014

2016

Current release

v20, April 2023

12.1, October 2016

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free version is available

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

restricted open source version available

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

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Windows
z/OS

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

hosted

Data scheme

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

schema-free

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

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

yes

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

ADO.NET
JDBC
JSON style queries

MongoDB compatible
ODBC
XQuery

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

C++ API
Java API

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

C
C#
C++
Cobol
Delphi
Fortran
Java
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Visual Basic

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java (JDBC-ODBC)
VBA
Visual Basic.NET

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

only with Windows/Unix/Linux Version

none

yes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

yes

with separate tools (MQ, InfoSphere)

none

yes

none

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

but no files for transaction logging

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

but no files for transaction logging

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

a simple user-level security was built in till version Access 2003

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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