DBMS > FoundationDB vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. Postgres-XL vs. Riak KV vs. RocksDB

System Properties Comparison FoundationDB vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. Postgres-XL vs. Riak KV vs. RocksDB

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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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

Based on PostgreSQL enhanced with MPP and write-scale-out cluster features

Distributed, fault tolerant key-value store

Embeddable persistent key-value store optimized for fast storage (flash and RAM)

Primary database model

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Document store

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

with links between data sets and object tags for the creation of secondary indexes

Key-value store

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial 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	0.49
Rank	#256	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Score	4.10
Rank	#82	Overall
	#9	Key-value stores

Score	3.65
Rank	#85	Overall
	#11	Key-value stores

Website

github.com/apple/foundationdb

firebase.google.com/products/firestore

www.postgres-xl.org

rocksdb.org

Technical documentation

apple.github.io/foundationdb

firebase.google.com/docs/firestore

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

www.tiot.jp/riak-docs/riak/kv/latest

github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki

Developer

FoundationDB

Google

OpenSource, formerly Basho Technologies

Facebook, Inc.

Initial release

2013

2017

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

2009

2013

Current release

6.2.28, November 2020

10 R1, October 2018

3.2.0, December 2022

8.11.4, April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

Mozilla public license

Open Source

Apache version 2, commercial enterprise edition

Open Source

BSD

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++

Erlang

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
macOS

Linux
OS X

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

some layers support schemas

schema-free

yes

schema-free

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

XML type, but no XML query functionality

Secondary indexes

yes

restricted

SQL

Support of SQL

supported in specific SQL layer only

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

APIs and other access methods

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

HTTP API
Native Erlang Interface

C++ API
Java API

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

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

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Erlang
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

unofficial client library
C#
C++

unofficial client library
Clojure

unofficial client library
Dart

unofficial client library
Erlang
Go

unofficial client library
Groovy

unofficial client library
Haskell

unofficial client library
Java
JavaScript

unofficial client library
Lisp

unofficial client library
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

unofficial client library
Smalltalk

unofficial client library

C
C++
Go
Java
Perl
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

in SQL-layer only

yes, Firebase Rules & Cloud Functions

user defined functions

Erlang

Triggers

yes, with Cloud Functions

yes

pre-commit hooks and post-commit hooks

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

horizontal partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication

selectable replication factor

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Using Cloud Dataflow

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Linearizable consistency

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

in SQL-layer only

yes

links between data sets can be stored

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

yes

ACID

MVCC

yes

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.

yes

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.

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes, using Riak Security

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