DBMS > DuckDB vs. FoundationDB vs. KairosDB

System Properties Comparison DuckDB vs. FoundationDB vs. KairosDB

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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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

An embeddable, in-process, column-oriented SQL OLAP RDBMS

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

Distributed Time Series DBMS based on Cassandra or H2

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Time Series DBMS

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

Score	7.44
Rank	#44	Overall
	#27	Relational DBMS

Score	0.89
Rank	#197	Overall
	#32	Document stores
	#29	Key-value stores
	#92	Relational DBMS

Score	0.56
Rank	#241	Overall
	#20	Time Series DBMS

Website

duckdb.org

github.com/apple/foundationdb

github.com/kairosdb/kairosdb

Technical documentation

duckdb.org/docs

apple.github.io/foundationdb

kairosdb.github.io

Developer

FoundationDB

Initial release

2018

2013

Current release

1.0.0, June 2024

6.2.28, November 2020

1.2.2, November 2018

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

MIT License

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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++

Java

Server operating systems

server-less

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

some layers support schemas

schema-free

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

yes

supported in specific SQL layer only

APIs and other access methods

Arrow Database Connectivity (ADBC)
CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Graphite protocol
HTTP REST
Telnet API

Supported programming languages

C
C#

3rd party driver
C++
Crystal

3rd party driver
Go

3rd party driver
Java
Lisp

3rd party driver
Python
R
Ruby

3rd party driver
Rust
Swift
Zig

3rd party driver

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

in SQL-layer only

Triggers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

based on Cassandra

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

yes

selectable replication factor

based on Cassandra

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Linearizable consistency

Eventual Consistency

based on Cassandra
Immediate Consistency

based on Cassandra

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

in SQL-layer only

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

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

User concepts

Access control

simple password-based access control

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More resources

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Recent citations in the news

Hands-On Exploratory Data Analysis with DuckDB
13 May 2025, Packt

Streamlining access to tabular datasets stored in Amazon S3 Tables with DuckDB | Amazon Web Services
18 March 2025, Amazon Web Services

Abusing DuckDB-WASM To Create Doom In SQL
23 April 2025, Hackaday

DuckDB project releases Local web UI, but not as open source
19 March 2025, devclass

DuckDB + Webassembly = WhatTheDuck
2 January 2025, i-programmer.info

provided by Google News

Apple Acquires Durable Database Company FoundationDB
24 March 2015, TechCrunch

FoundationDB Record Layer: A Multi-Tenant Structured Datastore
25 July 2020, Apple Machine Learning Research

Apple-owned FoundationDB open sources the core technology at the heart of iCloud
19 April 2018, AppleInsider

FoundationDB team’s new venture, Antithesis, raises $47M to enhance software testing
13 February 2024, SiliconANGLE

IBM Cloudant pulls plan to fund new foundational layer for CouchDB
15 March 2022, theregister.com

provided by Google News

Fig. 4. Analytics dashboard to visualize and correlate historical data...
8 September 2018, ResearchGate

Real-Time Performance and Health Monitoring Using Netdata
2 September 2019, CNX Software

provided by Google News

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