DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. FoundationDB vs. HBase vs. Quasardb vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. FoundationDB vs. HBase vs. Quasardb vs. Snowflake

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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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

Wide-column store based on Apache Hadoop and on concepts of BigTable

Distributed, high-performance timeseries database

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

Primary database model

Search engine

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Wide column store

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

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

Score	134.78
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

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

Score	31.25
Rank	#26	Overall
	#2	Wide column stores

Score	0.19
Rank	#327	Overall
	#30	Time Series DBMS

Score	123.20
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

github.com/apple/foundationdb

hbase.apache.org

quasar.ai

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

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

apple.github.io/foundationdb

hbase.apache.org/book.html

doc.quasar.ai/master

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Elastic

FoundationDB

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Powerset

quasardb

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2010

2013

2008

2009

2014

Current release

8.6, January 2023

6.2.28, November 2020

2.3.4, January 2021

3.14.1, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

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

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

Java

C++

Java

C++

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
Unix
Windows

using Cygwin

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

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

schema-free

some layers support schemas

schema-free, schema definition possible

schema-free

yes

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

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

some layers support typing

options to bring your own types, AVRO

yes

integer and binary

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

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

with tags

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

supported in specific SQL layer only

SQL-like query language

yes

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Java API
RESTful HTTP API
Thrift

HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

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

C
C#
C++
Groovy
Java
PHP
Python
Scala

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

in SQL-layer only

yes

Coprocessors in Java

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

consistent hashing

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication with selectable replication factor

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

yes

with Hadoop integration

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

Immediate Consistency or Eventual 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

Single row ACID (across millions of columns)

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using LevelDB

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

Memcached and Redis integration

yes

Transient mode

User concepts

Access control

Access Control Lists (ACL) for RBAC, integration with Apache Ranger for RBAC & ABAC

Cryptographically strong user authentication and audit trail

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

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