DBMS > FileMaker vs. FoundationDB vs. Sphinx vs. SQLite vs. VelocityDB

System Properties Comparison FileMaker vs. FoundationDB vs. Sphinx vs. SQLite 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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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

FileMaker is a cross-platform RDBMS that includes a GUI frontend.

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

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS
Object oriented DBMS

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

Score	48.20
Rank	#20	Overall
	#14	Relational DBMS

Score	1.03
Rank	#190	Overall
	#31	Document stores
	#28	Key-value stores
	#89	Relational DBMS

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	114.32
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Score	0.05
Rank	#358	Overall
	#36	Graph DBMS
	#16	Object oriented DBMS

Website

www.claris.com/filemaker

github.com/apple/foundationdb

sphinxsearch.com

www.sqlite.org

velocitydb.com

Technical documentation

www.claris.com/resources/documentation

apple.github.io/foundationdb

sphinxsearch.com/docs

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

velocitydb.com/UserGuide

Developer

Claris

a subsidiary of Apple

FoundationDB

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Dwayne Richard Hipp

VelocityDB Inc

Initial release

1983

2013

2001

2000

2011

Current release

19.4.1, November 2021

6.2.28, November 2020

3.5.1, February 2023

3.45.3 (15 April 2024), April 2024

7.x

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

Public Domain

commercial

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++

Server operating systems

iOS

client part only
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

server-less

Any that supports .NET

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

some layers support schemas

yes

dynamic column types

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

some layers support typing

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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

A http query request can return the data in XML format

Secondary indexes

yes

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

via plugins

supported in specific SQL layer only

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

APIs and other access methods

Filemaker WebDirect
JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

.Net

Supported programming languages

PHP

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

.Net

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

in SQL-layer only

Triggers

yes

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

none

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication, warm standby

since Version 14

yes

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Linearizable consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

in SQL-layer only

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

via file-system locks

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

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 rights management via user accounts and connection to external directory services

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.