DBMS > Citus vs. FoundationDB vs. Google BigQuery vs. Quasardb vs. TimesTen

System Properties Comparison Citus vs. FoundationDB vs. Google BigQuery vs. Quasardb vs. TimesTen

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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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

Scalable hybrid operational and analytics RDBMS for big data use cases based on PostgreSQL

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

Large scale data warehouse service with append-only tables

Distributed, high-performance timeseries database

In-Memory RDBMS compatible to Oracle

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

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

Score	2.21
Rank	#118	Overall
	#56	Relational DBMS

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

Score	60.38
Rank	#19	Overall
	#13	Relational DBMS

Score	0.14
Rank	#332	Overall
	#29	Time Series DBMS

Score	1.31
Rank	#163	Overall
	#74	Relational DBMS

Website

www.citusdata.com

github.com/apple/foundationdb

cloud.google.com/bigquery

quasar.ai

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/timesten.html

Technical documentation

docs.citusdata.com

apple.github.io/foundationdb

cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs

doc.quasar.ai/master

docs.oracle.com/database/timesten-18.1

Developer

FoundationDB

Google

quasardb

Oracle, TimesTen Performance Software, HP

originally founded in HP Labs it was acquired by Oracle in 2005

Initial release

2010

2013

2010

2009

1998

Current release

8.1, December 2018

6.2.28, November 2020

3.14.1, January 2024

11 Release 2 (11.2.2.8.0)

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Free community edition, Non-profit organizations and non-commercial usage are eligible for free licenses

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

Linux

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris SPARC/x86
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

some layers support schemas

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

some layers support typing

yes

integer and binary

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.

yes

specific XML type available, but no XML query functionality

Secondary indexes

yes

with tags

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

standard, with numerous extensions

supported in specific SQL layer only

yes

SQL-like query language

yes

APIs and other access methods

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

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

Supported programming languages

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

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

.Net
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

C
C++
Java
PL/SQL

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

in SQL-layer only

user defined functions

in JavaScript

PL/SQL

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

consistent hashing

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

yes

Source-replica replication with selectable replication factor

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

with Hadoop integration

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Linearizable consistency

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

in SQL-layer only

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Since BigQuery is designed for querying data

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using LevelDB

yes

by means of logfiles and checkpoints

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

Transient mode

yes

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access privileges (owner, writer, reader) on dataset, table or view level

Google Cloud Identity & Access Management (IAM)

Cryptographically strong user authentication and audit trail

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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