DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. FoundationDB vs. Interbase vs. Postgres-XL vs. SpaceTime

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. FoundationDB vs. Interbase vs. Postgres-XL vs. SpaceTime

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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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

Light-weight proven RDBMS

originally from Borland

Based on PostgreSQL enhanced with MPP and write-scale-out cluster features

SpaceTime is a spatio-temporal DBMS with a focus on performance.

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Relational DBMS

Spatial DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	4.61
Rank	#72	Overall
	#39	Relational DBMS

Score	0.49
Rank	#256	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#7	Spatial DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

github.com/apple/foundationdb

www.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

www.postgres-xl.org

www.mireo.com/spacetime

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

apple.github.io/foundationdb

docs.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

Developer

Amazon

FoundationDB

Embarcadero

Mireo

Initial release

2012

2013

1984

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

2020

Current release

6.2.28, November 2020

InterBase 2020, December 2019

10 R1, October 2018

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

Mozilla public license

commercial

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++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

Android
iOS
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
macOS

Linux

Data scheme

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.

export as XML data possible

yes

XML type, but no XML query functionality

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

supported in specific SQL layer only

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

A subset of ANSI SQL is implemented

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

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

RESTful HTTP API

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

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java
Object Pascal
PHP
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Erlang
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

C#
C++
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

in SQL-layer only

yes

Interbase procedure and trigger language

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

horizontal partitioning

Fixed-grid hypercubes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Interbase Change Views

Real-time block device replication (DRBD)

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

Linearizable consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

in SQL-layer only

yes

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

MVCC

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Multiversion concurreny control

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

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