DBMS > Couchbase vs. EXASOL vs. FoundationDB vs. Snowflake vs. Stardog

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. EXASOL vs. FoundationDB vs. Snowflake 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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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 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.

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

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

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

Graph DBMS
RDF store

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	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	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	2.02
Rank	#123	Overall
	#11	Graph DBMS
	#6	RDF stores

Website

www.couchbase.com

www.exasol.com

github.com/apple/foundationdb

www.snowflake.com

www.stardog.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

www.exasol.com/resources

apple.github.io/foundationdb

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.stardog.com

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Exasol

FoundationDB

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Stardog-Union

Initial release

2011

2000

2013

2014

2010

Current release

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

6.2.28, November 2020

7.3.0, May 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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

yes

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++

Java

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

some layers support schemas

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support

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

Import/export of XML data possible

Secondary indexes

yes

supports real-time indexing in full-text and geospatial

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

supported in specific SQL layer only

yes

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

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

CLI Client
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

.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 (Node.js)
Python

.Net
Clojure
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

user defined functions

in SQL-layer only

user defined functions

user defined functions and aggregates, HTTP Server extensions in Java

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

via event handlers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

yes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Multi-source replication in HA-Cluster

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

Immediate Consistency in HA-Cluster

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

in SQL-layer only

yes

relationships in graphs

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

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

Access rights for users and roles

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