DBMS > Couchbase vs. EXASOL vs. FoundationDB vs. Lovefield vs. SpaceTime

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. EXASOL vs. FoundationDB vs. Lovefield vs. SpaceTime

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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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 distributed document store with integrated cache, a powerful search engine, in-built operational and analytical capabilities, and an embedded mobile database

High-performance, in-memory, MPP database specifically designed for in-memory analytics.

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

Embeddable relational database for web apps written in pure JavaScript

SpaceTime is a spatio-temporal DBMS with a focus on performance.

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Relational DBMS

Spatial 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

Relational DBMS

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

Score	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	1.99
Rank	#124	Overall
	#58	Relational DBMS

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

Score	0.29
Rank	#293	Overall
	#133	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#7	Spatial DBMS

Website

www.couchbase.com

www.exasol.com

github.com/apple/foundationdb

google.github.io/lovefield

www.mireo.com/spacetime

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

www.exasol.com/resources

apple.github.io/foundationdb

github.com/google/lovefield/blob/master/docs/spec_index.md

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Exasol

FoundationDB

Google

Mireo

Initial release

2011

2000

2013

2014

2020

Current release

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

6.2.28, November 2020

2.1.12, February 2017

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

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++

JavaScript

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

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

tested with Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

supported in specific SQL layer only

SQL-like query language

via JavaScript builder pattern

A subset of ANSI SQL is implemented

APIs and other access methods

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

.Net
JDBC
ODBC
WebSocket

RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java
Lua
Python
R

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

JavaScript

C#
C++
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

user defined functions

in SQL-layer only

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

Using read-only observers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

none

Fixed-grid hypercubes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

yes

none

Real-time block device replication (DRBD)

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Hadoop integration

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Immediate Consistency

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

yes, by using IndexedDB or the cloud service Firebase Realtime Database

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

Ephemeral buckets

yes

using MemoryDB

User concepts

Access control

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

Access rights for users, groups and roles according to SQL-standard

yes

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