DBMS > FoundationDB vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison FoundationDB vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Snowflake

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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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

Cloud Firestore is an auto-scaling document database for storing, syncing, and querying data for mobile and web apps. It offers seamless integration with other Firebase and Google Cloud Platform products.

Search-as-a-service for web and mobile app development

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

Primary database model

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Document store

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

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

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

Score	7.85
Rank	#51	Overall
	#8	Document stores

Score	5.59
Rank	#63	Overall
	#7	Search engines

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

github.com/apple/foundationdb

firebase.google.com/products/firestore

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/search

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

apple.github.io/foundationdb

firebase.google.com/docs/firestore

learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

FoundationDB

Google

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2013

2017

2015

2014

Current release

6.2.28, November 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

some layers support schemas

schema-free

yes

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

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

Android
gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

Go
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
Python

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

in SQL-layer only

yes, Firebase Rules & Cloud Functions

user defined functions

Triggers

yes, with Cloud Functions

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Using Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Linearizable 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

yes

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.

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management. Security Rules for 3rd party authentication using Firebase Auth.

yes

using Azure authentication

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

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