DBMS > 4D vs. FoundationDB vs. Rockset vs. Snowflake vs. XTDB

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. FoundationDB vs. Rockset vs. Snowflake vs. XTDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market. As a consequence, the product was removed from the DB-Engines ranking. In April 2018, Apple open-sourced FoundationDB and it therefore reappears in the ranking.

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

Ordered key-value store. Core features are complimented by layers.

A scalable, reliable search and analytics service in the cloud, built on RocksDB

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Document store

Relational DBMS

Document store

Secondary database models

Relational DBMS
Search engine

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

Score	2.58
Rank	#108	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	1.03
Rank	#190	Overall
	#31	Document stores
	#28	Key-value stores
	#89	Relational DBMS

Score	0.79
Rank	#211	Overall
	#35	Document stores

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	0.11
Rank	#343	Overall
	#46	Document stores

Website

www.4d.com

github.com/apple/foundationdb

rockset.com

www.snowflake.com

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

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

apple.github.io/foundationdb

docs.rockset.com

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

www.xtdb.com/docs

Developer

4D, Inc

FoundationDB

Rockset

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Juxt Ltd.

Initial release

1984

2013

2019

2014

2019

Current release

v20, April 2023

6.2.28, November 2020

1.19, September 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

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

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

some layers support schemas

schema-free

yes

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

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

some layers support typing

dynamic typing

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

ingestion from XML files supported

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

supported in specific SQL layer only

Read-only SQL queries, including JOINs

yes

limited SQL, making use of Apache Calcite

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

HTTP REST

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

HTTP REST
JDBC

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Clojure
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

in SQL-layer only

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Automatic sharding

yes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

yes

yes, each node contains all data

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Linearizable consistency

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

in SQL-layer only

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

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.

User concepts

Access control

Users and groups

Access rights for users and organizations can be defined via Rockset console

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

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