DBMS > 4D vs. MaxDB vs. PouchDB vs. Sphinx vs. SQLite

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. MaxDB vs. PouchDB vs. Sphinx vs. SQLite

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

A robust and reliable RDBMS optimized to run all major SAP solutions

JavaScript DBMS with an API inspired by CouchDB

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

Primary database model

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

Score	2.58
Rank	#108	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	2.32
Rank	#112	Overall
	#55	Relational DBMS

Score	2.28
Rank	#115	Overall
	#21	Document stores

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	114.32
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

maxdb.sap.com/documentation

pouchdb.com/guides

sphinxsearch.com/docs

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

Developer

4D, Inc

SAP, acquired from Software AG (Adabas-D) in 1997

Apache Software Foundation

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Initial release

1984

2012

2001

2000

Current release

v20, April 2023

7.9.10.12, February 2024

7.1.1, June 2019

3.5.1, February 2023

3.46.0 (23 May 2024), May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Limited community edition free

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

Public Domain

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Implementation language

C++

JavaScript

C++

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Windows

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

server-less

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

dynamic column types

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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

via views

yes

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
WebDAV

HTTP REST

only for PouchDB Server
JavaScript API

Proprietary protocol

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

.Net
C#
Java
Perl
PHP
Python

JavaScript

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

View functions in JavaScript

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

with a proxy-based framework, named couchdb-lounge

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication

also with CouchDB databases
Source-replica replication

also with CouchDB databases

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

via file-system locks

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using IndexedDB, WebSQL or LevelDB as backend

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

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

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