DBMS > Amazon Redshift vs. Couchbase vs. Firebird vs. FoundationDB vs. PouchDB

System Properties Comparison Amazon Redshift vs. Couchbase vs. Firebird vs. FoundationDB vs. PouchDB

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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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

Large scale data warehouse service for use with business intelligence tools

A distributed document store with integrated cache, a powerful search engine, in-built operational and analytical capabilities, and an embedded mobile database

Firebird is an open source RDBMS forked from Borland's InterBase

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

JavaScript DBMS with an API inspired by CouchDB

Primary database model

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Document store

Secondary database models

Key-value store

originating from the former Membase product and supporting the Memcached protocol
Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

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

Score	15.25
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	16.74
Rank	#33	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	19.46
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	0.97
Rank	#191	Overall
	#32	Document stores
	#28	Key-value stores
	#87	Relational DBMS

Score	2.18
Rank	#114	Overall
	#21	Document stores

Website

aws.amazon.com/redshift

www.couchbase.com

www.firebirdsql.org

github.com/apple/foundationdb

pouchdb.com

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift

docs.couchbase.com

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

apple.github.io/foundationdb

pouchdb.com/guides

Developer

Amazon (based on PostgreSQL)

Couchbase, Inc.

Firebird Foundation

FoundationDB

Apache Software Foundation

Initial release

2012

2011

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2013

2012

Current release

Server: 7.2, June 2023; Mobile: 3.1, March 2022; Couchbase Capella (DBaaS), June 2023

5.0.1, August 2024

6.2.28, November 2020

7.1.1, June 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Business Source License (BSL 1.1); Commercial licenses also available

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

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, C++, Go and Erlang

C and C++

C++

JavaScript

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free

some layers support schemas

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

some layers support typing

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

restricted

yes

via views

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

does not fully support an SQL-standard

SQL++, extends ANSI SQL to JSON for operational, transactional, and analytic use cases

yes

supported in specific SQL layer only

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

CLI Client
HTTP REST
Kafka Connector
Native language bindings for CRUD, Query, Search and Analytics APIs
Spark Connector
Spring Data

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

HTTP REST

only for PouchDB Server
JavaScript API

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

JavaScript

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

in Python

Functions and timers in JavaScript and UDFs in Java, Python, SQL++

PSQL

in SQL-layer only

View functions in JavaScript

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Automatic Sharding

none

Sharding

with a proxy-based framework, named couchdb-lounge

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication

yes

Multi-source replication

also with CouchDB databases
Source-replica replication

also with CouchDB databases

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Linearizable consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

informational only, not enforced by the system

yes

in SQL-layer only

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Features a multi-generational MVCC architecture, readers do not block writers

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using IndexedDB, WebSQL or LevelDB as backend

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

Ephemeral buckets

yes

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

User and Administrator separation with password-based and LDAP integrated Authentication. Role-base access control.

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

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