DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Amazon Redshift vs. FoundationDB vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Spark SQL

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Amazon Redshift vs. FoundationDB vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Spark SQL

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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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

Hosted, scalable database service by Amazon with the data stored in Amazons cloud

Large scale data warehouse service for use with business intelligence tools

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

Search-as-a-service for web and mobile app development

Spark SQL is a component on top of 'Spark Core' for structured data processing

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Relational DBMS

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

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

Score	74.07
Rank	#17	Overall
	#3	Document stores
	#2	Key-value stores

Score	17.94
Rank	#34	Overall
	#21	Relational DBMS

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

Score	5.59
Rank	#63	Overall
	#7	Search engines

Score	18.96
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

aws.amazon.com/redshift

github.com/apple/foundationdb

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/search

spark.apache.org/sql

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift

apple.github.io/foundationdb

learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search

spark.apache.org/docs/latest/sql-programming-guide.html

Developer

Amazon

Amazon (based on PostgreSQL)

FoundationDB

Microsoft

Apache Software Foundation

Initial release

2012

2013

2015

2014

Current release

6.2.28, November 2020

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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++

Scala

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

some layers support schemas

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

some layers support typing

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

restricted

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

does not fully support an SQL-standard

supported in specific SQL layer only

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

Java
Python
R
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

in Python

in SQL-layer only

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes, utilizing Spark Core

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

Immediate Consistency

Linearizable consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

informational only, not enforced by the system

in SQL-layer only

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

ACID across one or more tables within a single AWS account and region

ACID

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.

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users and roles can be defined via the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes

using Azure authentication

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