DBMS > CockroachDB vs. Couchbase vs. FoundationDB vs. GBase vs. HyperSQL

System Properties Comparison CockroachDB vs. Couchbase vs. FoundationDB vs. GBase vs. HyperSQL

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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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

CockroachDB is a distributed database architected for modern cloud applications. It is wire compatible with PostgreSQL and backed by a Key-Value Store, which is either RocksDB or a purpose-built derivative, called Pebble.

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

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

Widely used RDBMS in China, including analytical, transactional, distributed transactional, and cloud-native data warehousing.

Multithreaded, transactional RDBMS written in Java

also known as HSQLDB

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Relational DBMS

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	6.15
Rank	#55	Overall
	#33	Relational DBMS

Score	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

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

Score	1.07
Rank	#185	Overall
	#86	Relational DBMS

Score	3.49
Rank	#87	Overall
	#47	Relational DBMS

Website

www.cockroachlabs.com

www.couchbase.com

github.com/apple/foundationdb

www.gbase.cn

hsqldb.org

Technical documentation

www.cockroachlabs.com/docs

docs.couchbase.com

apple.github.io/foundationdb

hsqldb.org/web/hsqlDocsFrame.html

Developer

Cockroach Labs

Couchbase, Inc.

FoundationDB

General Data Technology Co., Ltd.

Initial release

2015

2011

2013

2004

2001

Current release

23.1.1, May 2023

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

6.2.28, November 2020

GBase 8a, GBase 8s, GBase 8c

2.7.2, June 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0, commercial license available

Open Source

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

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

based on BSD license

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

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++

C, Java, Python

Java

Server operating systems

Linux
macOS
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

All OS with a Java VM

Embedded (into Java applications) and Client-Server operating modes

Data scheme

dynamic schema

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes, wire compatible with PostgreSQL

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

supported in specific SQL layer only

Standard with numerous extensions

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC

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

ADO.NET
C API
JDBC
ODBC

HTTP API

JDBC via HTTP
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby
Rust

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

in SQL-layer only

user defined functions

Java, SQL

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

horizontal partitioning (by key range)

all tables are translated to an ordered KV store and then broken down into 64MB ranges, which are then used as replicas in RAFT

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

horizontal partitioning (by range, list and hash) and vertical partitioning

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication using RAFT

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

yes

none

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

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

in SQL-layer only

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

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

Ephemeral buckets

yes

User concepts

Access control

Role-based access control

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

yes

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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