DBMS > 4D vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. NCache vs. TimesTen vs. Virtuoso

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. NCache vs. TimesTen vs. Virtuoso

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Open-Source and Enterprise in-memory Key-Value Store

In-Memory RDBMS compatible to Oracle

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

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Key-value store

Relational DBMS

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

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Document store
Search engine

Using distributed Lucene

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.68
Rank	#110	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

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

Score	0.98
Rank	#196	Overall
	#29	Key-value stores

Score	1.35
Rank	#165	Overall
	#75	Relational DBMS

Score	4.20
Rank	#83	Overall
	#14	Document stores
	#4	Graph DBMS
	#2	Native XML DBMS
	#45	Relational DBMS
	#2	RDF stores
	#9	Search engines

Website

www.4d.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

www.alachisoft.com/ncache

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

virtuoso.openlinksw.com

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

www.alachisoft.com/resources/docs

docs.oracle.com/database/timesten-18.1

docs.openlinksw.com/virtuoso

Developer

4D, Inc

Microsoft

Alachisoft

Oracle, TimesTen Performance Software, HP

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

OpenLink Software

Initial release

1984

2014

2005

1998

Current release

v20, April 2023

5.3.3, April 2024

11 Release 2 (11.2.2.8.0)

7.2.11, September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Enterprise Edition available

commercial

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#, .NET, .NET Core, Java

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
Windows

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

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

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

JSON types

partial

Supported data types are Lists, Queues, Hashsets, Dictionary and Counter

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

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

SQL-like query language

SQL-like query syntax and LINQ for searching the cache. Cache Synchronization with SQL Server using SQL dependency.

yes

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

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

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

IDistributedCache
JCache
LINQ
Proprietary native API

JDBC
ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

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

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

.Net
.Net Core
C#
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Scala

C
C++
Java
PL/SQL

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

JavaScript

support for stored procedures with SQL-Server CLR

PL/SQL

yes

Virtuoso PL

Triggers

yes

JavaScript

yes

Notifications

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

none

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes, with selectable consistency level

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

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

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

yes

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

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Strong Eventual Consistency over WAN with Conflict Resolution using Bridge Topology

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

optimistic locking and pessimistic locking

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by means of logfiles and checkpoints

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 can be defined down to the item level

Authentication to access the cache via Active Directory/LDAP (possible roles: user, administrator)

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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)

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

NCache has been the market leader in .NET Distributed Caching since 2005 . NCache...
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Virtuoso is a modern multi-model RDBMS for managing data represented as tabular relations...
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Competitive advantages

NCache is 100% .NET/ .NET Core based which fully supports ASP.NET Core Sessions ,...
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Performance & Scale — as exemplified by DBpedia and the LOD Cloud it spawned, i.e.,...
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Typical application scenarios

NCache enables industries like retail, finance, banking IoT, travel, ecommerce, healthcare...
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Used for — Analytics/BI Conceptual Data Virtualization Enterprise Knowledge Graphs...
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Key customers

Bank of America, Citi, Natures Way, Charter Spectrum, Barclays, Henry Schein, GBM,...
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Broad use across enterprises and governments including — European Union (EU) US Government...
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Market metrics

Market Leader in .NET Distributed Caching since 2005.
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Largest installed-base of Multi-Model RDBMS for AI-friendly Knowledge Graphs Platform...
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Licensing and pricing models

NCache Open Source is free on an as-is basis without any support. NCache Enterprise...
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Available in both Commercial Enterprise and Open Source (GPL v2) Editions Feature...
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