DBMS > Couchbase vs. FoundationDB vs. LevelDB vs. Quasardb vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. FoundationDB vs. LevelDB vs. Quasardb vs. TimescaleDB

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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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

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

Embeddable fast key-value storage library that provides an ordered mapping from string keys to string values

Distributed, high-performance timeseries database

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Key-value store

Time Series 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	16.59
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

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

Score	2.25
Rank	#115	Overall
	#19	Key-value stores

Score	0.21
Rank	#322	Overall
	#29	Time Series DBMS

Score	4.46
Rank	#71	Overall
	#5	Time Series DBMS

Website

www.couchbase.com

github.com/apple/foundationdb

github.com/google/leveldb

quasar.ai

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

apple.github.io/foundationdb

github.com/google/leveldb/blob/main/doc/index.md

doc.quasar.ai/master

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

FoundationDB

Google

quasardb

Timescale

Initial release

2011

2013

2011

2009

2017

Current release

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

6.2.28, November 2020

1.23, February 2021

3.14.1, January 2024

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

BSD

commercial

Free community edition, Non-profit organizations and non-commercial usage are eligible for free licenses

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

Illumos
Linux
OS X
Windows

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

some layers support schemas

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

some layers support typing

yes

integer and binary

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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

with tags

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

supported in specific SQL layer only

SQL-like query language

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

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

HTTP API

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

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

C++
Go
Java

3rd party binding
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party binding
Python

3rd party binding

.Net
C
C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

in SQL-layer only

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

none

Sharding

consistent hashing

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

yes

none

Source-replica replication with selectable replication factor

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

with Hadoop integration

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Linearizable consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

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

with automatic compression on writes

yes

by using LevelDB

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

Ephemeral buckets

yes

Transient mode

User concepts

Access control

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

Cryptographically strong user authentication and audit trail

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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