DBMS > 4D vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. mSQL vs. Postgres-XL

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. mSQL vs. Postgres-XL

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

mSQL (Mini SQL) is a simple and lightweight RDBMS

Based on PostgreSQL enhanced with MPP and write-scale-out cluster features

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.47
Rank	#110	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	27.71
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	1.27
Rank	#169	Overall
	#76	Relational DBMS

Score	0.53
Rank	#254	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

hughestech.com.au/products/msql

www.postgres-xl.org

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

Developer

4D, Inc

Microsoft

Hughes Technologies

Initial release

1984

2014

1994

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

Current release

v20, April 2023

4.4, October 2021

10 R1, October 2018

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free licenses can be provided

Open Source

Mozilla public 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

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

hosted

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

Linux
macOS

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

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

XML type, but no XML query functionality

Secondary indexes

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

SQL-like query language

A subset of ANSI SQL is implemented

no subqueries, aggregate functions, views, foreign keys, triggers

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

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

JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

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

C
C++
Delphi
Java
Perl
PHP
Tcl

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Erlang
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

JavaScript

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

JavaScript

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

horizontal partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

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

none

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

ACID

MVCC

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

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

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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