DBMS > FoundationDB vs. GBase vs. NuoDB vs. Snowflake vs. TiDB

System Properties Comparison FoundationDB vs. GBase vs. NuoDB vs. Snowflake vs. TiDB

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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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

An analytical database for business intelligence with large customers in China.

NuoDB is a webscale distributed database that supports SQL and ACID transactions

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

TiDB is an open source distributed SQL database that supports Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) workloads. It is MySQL compatible and features horizontal scalability, strong consistency, and high availability.

Primary database model

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

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

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

Score	1.04
Rank	#190	Overall
	#88	Relational DBMS

Score	0.99
Rank	#195	Overall
	#92	Relational DBMS

Score	123.20
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	4.94
Rank	#72	Overall
	#40	Relational DBMS

Website

github.com/apple/foundationdb

www.gbase.cn

www.3ds.com/nuodb-distributed-sql-database

www.snowflake.com

pingcap.com

Technical documentation

apple.github.io/foundationdb

doc.nuodb.com

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.pingcap.com/tidb/stable

Developer

FoundationDB

Dassault Systèmes

originally NuoDB, Inc.

Snowflake Computing Inc.

PingCAP, Inc.

Initial release

2013

2014

2016

Current release

6.2.28, November 2020

GBase 8a

7.6.0, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

limited edition free

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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.

TiDB Cloud: Fully-managed TiDB Service. Bring everything great about TiDB to the cloud.

Implementation language

C++

Go, Rust

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Amazon EC2, Windows Azure, SoftLayer
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

some layers support schemas

yes

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

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

supported in specific SQL layer only

yes

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

GORM
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
SQLAlchemy

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

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

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

Java, SQL

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

data is dynamically stored/cached on the nodes where it is read/written

yes

horizontal partitioning (by key range)

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Managed transparently by NuoDB

yes

Using Raft consensus algorithm to ensure data replication with strong consistency among multiple replicas.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

with TiSpark Connector

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Linearizable consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

in SQL-layer only

yes

full support since version 6.6

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

tunable commit protocol

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

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

Temporary table

User concepts

Access control

Standard SQL roles/ privileges, Administrative Users

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

Fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

TiDB is an advanced open-source, distributed SQL database for modern application...
» more

Competitive advantages

- HORIZONTAL SCALING : TiDB grants total transparency into your data workloads without...
» more

Typical application scenarios

TiDB is ideal for transactional applications that require extreme scalability and...
» more

Key customers

Block, Pinterest, Catalyst, Bolt, Flipkart, Capcom, Shopee (E-commerce), JD Cloud...
» more

Market metrics

34K+ GitHub stars 5K+ members in TiDB Community Slack 1K+ community contributors...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

TiDB Community : Free open source software (Apache 2.0) TiDB Self-Hosted : Enterprise...
» more

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