DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Elasticsearch vs. FoundationDB vs. Google Cloud Bigtable vs. GraphDB

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Elasticsearch vs. FoundationDB vs. Google Cloud Bigtable vs. GraphDB

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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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

A distributed, RESTful modern search and analytics engine based on Apache Lucene

Elasticsearch lets you perform and combine many types of searches such as structured, unstructured, geo, and metric

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

Google's NoSQL Big Data database service. It's the same database that powers many core Google services, including Search, Analytics, Maps, and Gmail.

Enterprise-ready RDF and graph database with efficient reasoning, cluster and external index synchronization support. It supports also SQL JDBC access to Knowledge Graph and GraphQL over SPARQL.

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Search engine

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Key-value store
Wide column store

Graph DBMS
RDF store

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

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

Score	74.45
Rank	#17	Overall
	#3	Document stores
	#2	Key-value stores

Score	132.83
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	1.06
Rank	#185	Overall
	#31	Document stores
	#28	Key-value stores
	#85	Relational DBMS

Score	3.15
Rank	#95	Overall
	#14	Key-value stores
	#8	Wide column stores

Score	3.25
Rank	#91	Overall
	#7	Graph DBMS
	#4	RDF stores

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

github.com/apple/foundationdb

cloud.google.com/bigtable

www.ontotext.com

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/index.html

apple.github.io/foundationdb

cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs

graphdb.ontotext.com/documentation

Social network pages

Developer

Amazon

Elastic

FoundationDB

Google

Ontotext

Initial release

2012

2010

2013

2015

2000

Current release

8.6, January 2023

6.2.28, November 2020

10.4, October 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

Open Source

Elastic License

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Some plugins of GraphDB Workbench are open sourced

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

Java

C++

Java

Server operating systems

hosted

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

All OS with a Java VM
Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

schema-free

some layers support schemas

schema-free

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support; RDF shapes

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

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes, supports real-time synchronization and indexing in SOLR/Elastic search/Lucene and GeoSPARQL geometry data indexes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

supported in specific SQL layer only

stored SPARQL accessed as SQL using Apache Calcite through JDBC/ODBC

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
HappyBase (Python library)
HBase compatible API (Java)

GeoSPARQL
GraphQL
GraphQL Federation
Java API
JDBC
RDF4J API
RDFS
RIO
Sail API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL 1.1

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
Groovy
Community Contributed Clients
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net
C#
Clojure
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

in SQL-layer only

well-defined plugin interfaces; JavaScript server-side extensibility

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Internal replication in Colossus, and regional replication between two clusters in different zones

Multi-source replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

ES-Hadoop Connector

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

Linearizable consistency

Immediate consistency (for a single cluster), Eventual consistency (for two or more replicated clusters)

Immediate Consistency, Eventual consistency (configurable in cluster mode per master or individual client request)

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

in SQL-layer only

yes

Constraint checking

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

Atomic single-row operations

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.

Memcached and Redis integration

User concepts

Access control

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

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Default Basic authentication through RDF4J client, or via Java when run with cURL, default token-based in the Workbench or via Rest API, optional access through OpenID or Kerberos single sign-on.

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Ontotext GraphDB is a semantic database engine that allows organizations to build...
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Competitive advantages

GraphDB allows you to link text and data in big knowledge graphs. It’s easy to experiment...
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Typical application scenarios

Metadata enrichment and management, linked data publishing, semantic inferencing...
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Key customers

GraphDB provides a platform for building next-generation AI and Knowledge Graph...
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Market metrics

GraphDB is the most utilized semantic triplestore for mission-critical enterprise...
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Licensing and pricing models

GraphDB Free is a non-commercial version and is free to use. GraphDB Enterprise edition...
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