DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. FoundationDB

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. FoundationDB

Please select another system to include it in the comparison.

Our visitors often compare Elasticsearch and FoundationDB with Apache Cassandra, PostgreSQL and RocksDB.

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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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, RESTful modern search and analytics engine based on Apache Lucene

Elasticsearch lets you perform and combine many types of searches such as structured, unstructured, geo, and metric

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

Primary database model

Search engine
Vector DBMS

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	123.81
Rank	#9	Overall
	#1	Search engines
	#1	Vector DBMS

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

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

github.com/apple/foundationdb

Technical documentation

www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/index.html

apple.github.io/foundationdb

Developer

Elastic

FoundationDB

Initial release

2010

2013

Current release

8.6, January 2023

6.2.28, November 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

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

Java

C++

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

schema-free

some layers support schemas

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

some layers support typing

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

All search fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

supported in specific SQL layer only

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

.Net
Groovy
Community Contributed Clients
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

in SQL-layer only

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

Linearizable consistency

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

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.

Memcached and Redis integration

User concepts

Access control

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.

Related products and services

We invite representatives of vendors of related products to contact us for presenting information about their offerings here.

More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

PostgreSQL is the DBMS of the Year 2017
2 January 2018, Paul Andlinger, Matthias Gelbmann

Elasticsearch moved into the top 10 most popular database management systems
3 July 2017, Matthias Gelbmann

MySQL, PostgreSQL and Redis are the winners of the March ranking
2 March 2016, Paul Andlinger

show all

Recent citations in the news

OpenSearch 3.0 hits: First major release under Linux Foundation as it battles ElasticSearch for mindshare
7 May 2025, devclass

Elasticsearch 7.0 rc1 releases with new allocation and security features
10 May 2025, Packt

OpenSearch in 2025: Much more than an Elasticsearch fork
28 April 2025, InfoWorld

Amazon OpenSearch Service announces Standard and Extended Support dates for Elasticsearch and OpenSearch versions
7 November 2024, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Elasticsearch Now Available as a Native Grounding Engine on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Platform
9 April 2025, Business Wire

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

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

FoundationDB, a very interesting NoSQL database owned by Apple, is now an open-source project
19 April 2018, GeekWire

provided by Google News

Share this page