DBMS > 4D vs. Microsoft Access vs. Snowflake vs. TerarkDB vs. Virtuoso

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Microsoft Access vs. Snowflake vs. TerarkDB vs. Virtuoso

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.)

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

Virtuoso is a multi-model hybrid-RDBMS that supports management of data represented as relational tables and/or property graphs

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Native XML DBMS
Relational DBMS
RDF store
Search engine

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.47
Rank	#110	Overall
	#54	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

Score	4.27
Rank	#73	Overall
	#13	Document stores
	#4	Graph DBMS
	#2	Native XML DBMS
	#39	Relational DBMS
	#2	RDF stores
	#9	Search engines

Website

www.4d.com

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

www.snowflake.com

github.com/bytedance/terarkdb

virtuoso.openlinksw.com

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

bytedance.larkoffice.com/docs/doccnZmYFqHBm06BbvYgjsHHcKc

docs.openlinksw.com/virtuoso

Developer

4D, Inc

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

ByteDance, originally Terark

OpenLink Software

Initial release

1984

1992

2014

2016

1998

Current release

v20, April 2023

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

7.2.11, September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

restricted open source version available

Open Source

GPLv2, extended commercial license 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++

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

hosted

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

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

schema-free

yes

SQL - Standard relational schema
RDF - Quad (S, P, O, G) or Triple (S, P, O)
XML - DTD, XML Schema
DAV - freeform filesystem objects, plus User Defined Types a/k/a Dynamic Extension Type

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

SQL-92, SQL-200x, SQL-3, SQLX

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

C++ API
Java API

ADO.NET
GeoSPARQL
HTTP API
JDBC
Jena RDF API
ODBC
OLE DB
RDF4J API
RESTful HTTP API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SOAP webservices
SPARQL 1.1
WebDAV
XPath
XQuery
XSLT

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++
Java

.Net
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Visual Basic

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

user defined functions

yes

Virtuoso PL

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

yes

none

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

none

yes

none

Chain, star, and bi-directional replication
Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

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

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

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

Fine-grained Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) in addition to typical coarse-grained Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) according to SQL-standard. Pluggable authentication with supported standards (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos)

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Licensing and pricing models

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