DBMS > Couchbase vs. FoundationDB vs. LevelDB vs. Sequoiadb vs. TiDB

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. FoundationDB vs. LevelDB vs. Sequoiadb vs. TiDB

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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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

NewSQL database with distributed OLTP and SQL

TiDB is an open source distributed SQL database that supports Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) workloads. It is MySQL compatible and features horizontal scalability, strong consistency, and high availability.

Primary database model

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Key-value store

Document store
Relational DBMS

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

Document store

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

Score	18.46
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	1.07
Rank	#188	Overall
	#31	Document stores
	#28	Key-value stores
	#86	Relational DBMS

Score	2.75
Rank	#107	Overall
	#19	Key-value stores

Score	0.48
Rank	#260	Overall
	#41	Document stores
	#121	Relational DBMS

Score	4.94
Rank	#72	Overall
	#40	Relational DBMS

Website

www.couchbase.com

github.com/apple/foundationdb

github.com/google/leveldb

www.sequoiadb.com

pingcap.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

apple.github.io/foundationdb

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

www.sequoiadb.com/en/index.php?m=Files&a=index

docs.pingcap.com/tidb/stable

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

FoundationDB

Google

Sequoiadb Ltd.

PingCAP, Inc.

Initial release

2011

2013

2011

2013

2016

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

7.6.0, January 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

Open Source

Server: AGPL; Client: Apache V2

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.

TiDB Cloud: Fully-managed TiDB Service. Bring everything great about TiDB to the cloud.

Implementation language

C, C++, Go and Erlang

C++

Go, Rust

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

Illumos
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

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

oid, date, timestamp, binary, regex

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

supported in specific SQL layer only

SQL-like query language

yes

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

proprietary protocol using JSON

GORM
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
SQLAlchemy

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++
Java
PHP
Python

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

in SQL-layer only

JavaScript

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

none

Sharding

horizontal partitioning (by key range)

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

Using Raft consensus algorithm to ensure data replication with strong consistency among multiple replicas.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

with TiSpark Connector

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Linearizable consistency

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

in SQL-layer only

yes

full support since version 6.6

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Document is locked during a transaction

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

with automatic compression on writes

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

Ephemeral buckets

User concepts

Access control

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

simple password-based access control

Fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

TiDB is an advanced open-source, distributed SQL database for modern application...
» more

Competitive advantages

- HORIZONTAL SCALING : TiDB grants total transparency into your data workloads without...
» more

Typical application scenarios

TiDB is ideal for transactional applications that require extreme scalability and...
» more

Key customers

Block, Pinterest, Catalyst, Bolt, Flipkart, Capcom, Shopee (E-commerce), JD Cloud...
» more

Market metrics

34K+ GitHub stars 5K+ members in TiDB Community Slack 1K+ community contributors...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

TiDB Community : Free open source software (Apache 2.0) TiDB Self-Hosted : Enterprise...
» more

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.