DBMS > 4D vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

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.)

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.68
Rank	#110	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	105.40
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	29.85
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Website

www.4d.com

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

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

Developer

4D, Inc

Microsoft

Initial release

1984

1992

2014

Current release

v20, April 2023

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C++

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

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

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

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

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

JavaScript

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

JavaScript

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

none

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session 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

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

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.

User concepts

Access control

Users and groups

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

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

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