DBMS > Couchbase vs. FoundationDB vs. RDF4J vs. Snowflake vs. VelocityDB

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. FoundationDB vs. RDF4J vs. Snowflake vs. VelocityDB

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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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

RDF4J is a Java framework for processing RDF data, supporting both memory-based and a disk-based storage.

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

A .NET Object Database that can be embedded/distributed and extended to a graph data model (VelocityGraph)

Primary database model

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

RDF store

Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS
Object oriented 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

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	0.74
Rank	#222	Overall
	#9	RDF stores

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	0.11
Rank	#354	Overall
	#37	Graph DBMS
	#15	Object oriented DBMS

Website

www.couchbase.com

github.com/apple/foundationdb

rdf4j.org

www.snowflake.com

velocitydb.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

apple.github.io/foundationdb

rdf4j.org/documentation

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

velocitydb.com/UserGuide

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

FoundationDB

Since 2016 officially forked into an Eclipse project, former developer was Aduna Software.

Snowflake Computing Inc.

VelocityDB Inc

Initial release

2011

2013

2004

2014

2011

Current release

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

6.2.28, November 2020

7.x

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Eclipse Distribution License (EDL), v1.0.

commercial

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

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

hosted

Any that supports .NET

Data scheme

schema-free

some layers support schemas

yes

RDF Schemas

yes

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

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.

yes

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

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

Java API
RIO

RDF Input/Output
Sail API
SeRQL

Sesame RDF Query Language
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

.Net

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

Java
PHP
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

in SQL-layer only

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

none

yes

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

yes

none

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

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

Isolation support depends on the API used

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

in-memory storage is supported as well

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.

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

Based on Windows Authentication

More information provided by the system vendor

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.