DBMS > 4D vs. dBASE vs. Interbase vs. MySQL vs. searchxml

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. dBASE vs. Interbase vs. MySQL vs. searchxml

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

dBase was one of the first databases with a development environment on PC's. Its latest version dBase V is still sold as dBase classic, which needs a DOS Emulation. The up-to-date product is dBase plus.

Light-weight proven RDBMS

originally from Borland

Widely used open source RDBMS

DBMS for structured and unstructured content wrapped with an application server

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Native XML DBMS
Search engine

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.68
Rank	#110	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	11.18
Rank	#44	Overall
	#28	Relational DBMS

Score	5.04
Rank	#71	Overall
	#39	Relational DBMS

Score	1087.72
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	0.01
Rank	#386	Overall
	#7	Native XML DBMS
	#24	Search engines

Website

www.4d.com

www.dbase.com

www.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

www.mysql.com

www.searchxml.net/category/products

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

www.dbase.com/support/knowledgebase

docs.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

dev.mysql.com/doc

www.searchxml.net/support/handouts

Developer

4D, Inc

Asthon Tate

Embarcadero

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

informationpartners gmbh

Initial release

1984

1979

1984

1995

2015

Current release

v20, April 2023

dBASE 2019, 2019

InterBase 2020, December 2019

8.3.0, January 2024

1.0

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

DOS

dBase Classic
Windows

dBase Pro

Android
iOS
Linux
OS X
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Windows

Data scheme

yes

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

export as XML data possible

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

yes

with proprietary extensions

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

none

The IDE can access other DBMS or ODBC-sources.

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

RESTful HTTP API
WebDAV
XQuery
XSLT

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

dBase proprietary IDE

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java
Object Pascal
PHP
Ruby

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

C++

most other programming languages supported via APIs

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

The IDE can access stored procedures in other database systems.

yes

Interbase procedure and trigger language

yes

proprietary syntax

yes

on the application server

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

none

Interbase Change Views

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

sychronisation to multiple collections

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

not for MyISAM storage engine

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

ACID

not for dBase internal data, but IDE does support transactions when accessing external DBMS

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

multiple readers, single writer

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Multiversion concurreny control

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

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 and roles

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

Domain, group and role-based access control at the document level and for application services

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