DBMS > FoundationDB vs. GBase vs. H2 vs. Milvus vs. Vitess

System Properties Comparison FoundationDB vs. GBase vs. H2 vs. Milvus vs. Vitess

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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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

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

Widely used RDBMS in China, including analytical, transactional, distributed transactional, and cloud-native data warehousing.

Full-featured RDBMS with a small footprint, either embedded into a Java application or used as a database server.

A DBMS designed for efficient storage of vector data and vector similarity searches

Scalable, distributed, cloud-native DBMS, extending MySQL

Primary database model

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	1.06
Rank	#185	Overall
	#31	Document stores
	#28	Key-value stores
	#85	Relational DBMS

Score	1.05
Rank	#186	Overall
	#86	Relational DBMS

Score	8.33
Rank	#46	Overall
	#30	Relational DBMS

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	0.88
Rank	#203	Overall
	#95	Relational DBMS

Website

github.com/apple/foundationdb

Technical documentation

apple.github.io/foundationdb

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

vitess.io/docs

Developer

FoundationDB

General Data Technology Co., Ltd.

Thomas Mueller

The Linux Foundation, PlanetScale

Initial release

2013

2004

2005

2019

2013

Current release

6.2.28, November 2020

GBase 8a, GBase 8s, GBase 8c

2.2.220, July 2023

2.3.4, January 2024

15.0.2, December 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

dual-licence (Mozilla public license, Eclipse public license)

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0, commercial licenses available

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.

Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Implementation language

C++

C, Java, Python

Java

C++, Go

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Docker
Linux
macOS

Data scheme

schema-free

some layers support schemas

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

some layers support typing

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

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

supported in specific SQL layer only

Standard with numerous extensions

yes

with proprietary extensions

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C API
JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
MySQL protocol
ODBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

Java

C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

in SQL-layer only

user defined functions

Java Stored Procedures and User-Defined Functions

yes

proprietary syntax

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

horizontal partitioning (by range, list and hash) and vertical partitioning

none

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

With clustering: 2 database servers on different computers operate on identical copies of a database

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Linearizable consistency

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Eventual Consistency across shards
Immediate Consistency within a shard

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

in SQL-layer only

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

ACID at shard level

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

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

yes

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Milvus is an open-source and cloud-native vector database built for production-ready...
» more

Competitive advantages

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
» more

Typical application scenarios

RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
» more

Key customers

Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
» more

Market metrics

As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Milvus was released under the open-source Apache License 2.0 in October 2019. Fully-managed...
» more

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

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More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

Vector databases
2 June 2023, Matthias Gelbmann

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