DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. FoundationDB vs. Google Cloud Bigtable vs. IBM Db2 Event Store vs. XTDB

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. FoundationDB vs. Google Cloud Bigtable vs. IBM Db2 Event Store 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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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

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

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.

Distributed Event Store optimized for Internet of Things use cases

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

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Key-value store
Wide column store

Event Store
Time Series DBMS

Document store

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	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	0.27
Rank	#309	Overall
	#2	Event Stores
	#28	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.18
Rank	#332	Overall
	#46	Document stores

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

github.com/apple/foundationdb

cloud.google.com/bigtable

www.ibm.com/products/db2-event-store

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

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

apple.github.io/foundationdb

cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs

www.ibm.com/docs/en/db2-event-store

www.xtdb.com/docs

Developer

Amazon

FoundationDB

Google

IBM

Juxt Ltd.

Initial release

2012

2013

2015

2017

2019

Current release

6.2.28, November 2020

2.0

1.19, September 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

free developer edition available

Open Source

MIT License

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C++

C and C++

Clojure

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux

Linux, macOS, Windows for the developer addition

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

Data scheme

schema-free

some layers support schemas

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

some layers support 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.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

supported in specific SQL layer only

yes

through the embedded Spark runtime

limited SQL, making use of Apache Calcite

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

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

ADO.NET
DB2 Connect
JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

HTTP REST
JDBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
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

C
C#
C++
Cobol
Delphi
Fortran
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Visual Basic

Clojure
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

in SQL-layer only

yes

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

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

Active-active shard replication

yes, each node contains all data

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

Linearizable consistency

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

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

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

Atomic single-row operations

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

No - written data is immutable

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Yes - Synchronous writes to local disk combined with replication and asynchronous writes in parquet format to permanent shared storage

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.

yes

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)

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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