DBMS > FoundationDB vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Oracle

System Properties Comparison FoundationDB vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Oracle

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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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

A horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service. It is the externalization of the core Google database that runs the biggest aspects of Google, like Ads and Google Play.

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Widely used RDBMS

Primary database model

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Relational DBMS

Document store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
RDF store

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
Spatial DBMS

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
Vector DBMS

since Oracle 23

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	2.84
Rank	#100	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Score	2.75
Rank	#104	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Score	1244.08
Rank	#1	Overall
	#1	Relational DBMS

Website

github.com/apple/foundationdb

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

www.oracle.com/database

Technical documentation

apple.github.io/foundationdb

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

docs.oracle.com/en/database

Developer

FoundationDB

Google

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Oracle

Initial release

2013

2017

2010

1980

Current release

6.2.28, November 2020

23c, September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

restricted free version is available

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.

Implementation language

C++

Erlang

C and C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows
z/OS

Data scheme

schema-free

some layers support schemas

yes

schema-free

yes

Schemaless in JSON and XML columns

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

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

with proprietary extensions

APIs and other access methods

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

JDBC
ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

C
C#
C++
Clojure
Cobol
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Fortran
Groovy
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Objective C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Tcl
Visual Basic

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

in SQL-layer only

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

PL/SQL

also stored procedures in Java possible

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

yes

can be realized in PL/SQL

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Linearizable consistency

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

in SQL-layer only

yes

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

isolation level can be parameterized

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

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

Version 12c introduced the new option 'Oracle Database In-Memory'

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Access rights for users can be defined per database

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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