DBMS > FoundationDB vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison FoundationDB vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Weaviate

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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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

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

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Microsoft Access combines a backend RDBMS (JET / ACE Engine) with a GUI frontend for data manipulation and queries.

The Access frontend is often used for accessing other datasources (DBMS, Excel, etc.)

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

An AI-native realtime vector database engine that integrates scalable machine learning models.

Primary database model

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Document store

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

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

Score	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	29.04
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	1.73
Rank	#143	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Website

github.com/apple/foundationdb

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/access

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

apple.github.io/foundationdb

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

FoundationDB

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Microsoft

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2013

2010

1992

2014

2019

Current release

6.2.28, November 2020

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate Enterprise

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++

Erlang

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

some layers support schemas

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

some layers support typing

yes

JSON types

yes

string, int, float, geo point, date, cross reference, fuzzy references

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 properties auto-indexed by default

yes

all data objects are indexed in a semantic vector space (the Contextionary), all primitive fields are indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

supported in specific SQL layer only

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

SQL-like query language

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java (JDBC-ODBC)
VBA
Visual Basic.NET

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

in SQL-layer only

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

JavaScript

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

JavaScript

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Linearizable consistency

Eventual Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

in SQL-layer only

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

but no files for transaction logging

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 can be defined per database

a simple user-level security was built in till version Access 2003

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
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Competitive advantages

Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
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Typical application scenarios

As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
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Key customers

All companies that have data.
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Market metrics

As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
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Licensing and pricing models

Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
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