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

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

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

In-Memory RDBMS compatible to Oracle

A general purpose database with bitemporal SQL and Datalog and graph queries

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Document store

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.58
Rank	#108	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	29.04
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	1.31
Rank	#163	Overall
	#74	Relational DBMS

Score	0.11
Rank	#343	Overall
	#46	Document stores

Website

www.4d.com

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

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/timesten.html

github.com/xtdb/xtdb
www.xtdb.com

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

docs.oracle.com/database/timesten-18.1

www.xtdb.com/docs

Developer

4D, Inc

Microsoft

Oracle, TimesTen Performance Software, HP

originally founded in HP Labs it was acquired by Oracle in 2005

Juxt Ltd.

Initial release

1984

1992

2014

1998

2019

Current release

v20, April 2023

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

11 Release 2 (11.2.2.8.0)

1.19, September 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

Open Source

MIT License

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++

Clojure

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

hosted

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris SPARC/x86
Windows

All OS with a Java 8 (and higher) VM
Linux

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

yes

yes, extensible-data-notation format

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

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

SQL-like query language

yes

limited SQL, making use of Apache Calcite

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

JDBC
ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

HTTP REST
JDBC

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

C
C++
Java
PL/SQL

Clojure
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

JavaScript

PL/SQL

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

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

none

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes, each node contains all data

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

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

but no files for transaction logging

yes

by means of logfiles and checkpoints

yes, flexibel persistency by using storage technologies like Apache Kafka, RocksDB or LMDB

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

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

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.