DBMS > FileMaker vs. ObjectBox vs. RRDtool vs. SQLite vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison FileMaker vs. ObjectBox vs. RRDtool vs. SQLite vs. TimescaleDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

FileMaker is a cross-platform RDBMS that includes a GUI frontend.

Lightweight, fast on-device database for IoT, Mobile and Embedded devices, persisting and synchronising objects and vectors

Industry standard data logging and graphing tool for time series data. RRD is an acronym for round-robin database.

The data is stored in a circular buffer, thus the system storage footprint remains constant over time.

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Object oriented DBMS
Vector DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	45.20
Rank	#20	Overall
	#14	Relational DBMS

Score	1.08
Rank	#179	Overall
	#6	Object oriented DBMS
	#9	Vector DBMS

Score	1.70
Rank	#136	Overall
	#11	Time Series DBMS

Score	103.35
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Score	4.06
Rank	#73	Overall
	#5	Time Series DBMS

Website

www.claris.com/filemaker

github.com/objectbox
objectbox.io

oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool

www.sqlite.org

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

www.claris.com/resources/documentation

docs.objectbox.io

oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/doc

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Claris

a subsidiary of Apple

ObjectBox Limited

Tobias Oetiker

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Timescale

Initial release

1983

2017

1999

2000

2017

Current release

19.4.1, November 2021

4.0 (May 2024)

1.8.0, 2022

3.46.1 (13 August 2024), August 2024

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Bindings are released under Apache 2.0

Apache License 2.0

Open Source

GPL V2 and FLOSS

Open Source

Public Domain

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Implementation language

C and C++

Implementations in Java (e.g. RRD4J) and C# available

Server operating systems

iOS

client part only
Linux
OS X
Windows

Android
Any POSIX system
Docker
iOS
Linux
macOS
QNX
Windows

HP-UX
Linux

server-less

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

dynamic column types

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes, plus "flex" map-like types

Numeric data only

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data 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

A http query request can return the data in XML format

Exporting into and restoring from XML files possible

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

via plugins

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

Filemaker WebDirect
JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary native API

in-process shared library
Pipes

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

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

Supported programming languages

PHP

C
C++
Dart (Flutter)
Go
Java
Kotlin
Python
Swift

with librrd library
C#

with a different implementation of RRDTool
Java

with a different implementation of RRDTool
JavaScript (Node.js)

with a different implementation of RRDTool
Lua
Perl
PHP

with a wrapper library
Python
Ruby

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication, warm standby

since Version 14

Data sync between devices allowing occasional connected databases to work completely offline

none

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

none

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

by using the rrdcached daemon

yes

via file-system locks

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.

yes

User concepts

Access control

simple rights management via user accounts and connection to external directory services

yes

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

News

MongoDB Realm & Device Sync alternatives – ObjectBox
17 September 2024

Local AI – what it is and why we need it
11 September 2024

First on-device Vector Database (aka Semantic Index) for iOS
24 July 2024

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) with vector databases: Expanding AI Capabilities
18 June 2024

The on-device Vector Database for Android and Java
29 May 2024

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