DBMS > CouchDB vs. FoundationDB vs. Postgres-XL vs. SAP HANA vs. Stardog

System Properties Comparison CouchDB vs. FoundationDB vs. Postgres-XL vs. SAP HANA vs. Stardog

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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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

A native JSON - document store inspired by Lotus Notes, scalable from globally distributed server-clusters down to mobile phones.

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

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

In-memory, column based data store. Available as appliance or cloud service

Enterprise Knowledge Graph platform and graph DBMS with high availability, high performance reasoning, and virtualization

Primary database model

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS
RDF store

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

Document store
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

with SAP Hana, Enterprise Edition
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	8.30
Rank	#47	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	1.06
Rank	#185	Overall
	#31	Document stores
	#28	Key-value stores
	#85	Relational DBMS

Score	0.53
Rank	#254	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Score	44.27
Rank	#23	Overall
	#16	Relational DBMS

Score	2.07
Rank	#122	Overall
	#11	Graph DBMS
	#6	RDF stores

Website

couchdb.apache.org

github.com/apple/foundationdb

www.postgres-xl.org

www.sap.com/products/hana.html

www.stardog.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

apple.github.io/foundationdb

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

help.sap.com/hana

docs.stardog.com

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Damien Katz, a former Lotus Notes developer

FoundationDB

SAP

Stardog-Union

Initial release

2005

2013

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

2010

Current release

3.3.3, December 2023

6.2.28, November 2020

10 R1, October 2018

2.0 SPS07 (April 4, 2023), April 2023

7.3.0, May 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Mozilla public license

commercial

60-day fully-featured trial license; 1-year fully-featured non-commercial use license for academics/students

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

also available as a cloud based service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

Erlang

C++

Java

Server operating systems

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
macOS

Appliance or cloud-service

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

some layers support schemas

yes

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

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

XML type, but no XML query functionality

Import/export of XML data possible

Secondary indexes

yes

via views

yes

supports real-time indexing in full-text and geospatial

SQL

Support of SQL

supported in specific SQL layer only

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

yes

Yes, compatible with all major SQL variants through dedicated BI/SQL Server

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

JDBC
ODBC

GraphQL query language
HTTP API
Jena RDF API
OWL
RDF4J API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SNARL
SPARQL
Spring Data
Stardog Studio
TinkerPop 3

Supported programming languages

C
C#
ColdFusion
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
Ruby
Smalltalk

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

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

.Net
Clojure
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

in SQL-layer only

user defined functions

SQLScript, R

user defined functions and aggregates, HTTP Server extensions in Java

Triggers

yes

via event handlers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

yes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Multi-source replication in HA-Cluster

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Linearizable consistency

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency in HA-Cluster

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

in SQL-layer only

yes

relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

atomic operations within a single document possible

ACID

MVCC

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

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 can be defined per database

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes

Access rights for users and roles

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