DBMS > FoundationDB vs. GraphDB vs. PouchDB vs. Sphinx vs. SQLite

System Properties Comparison FoundationDB vs. GraphDB vs. PouchDB vs. Sphinx vs. SQLite

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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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

Enterprise-ready RDF and graph database with efficient reasoning, cluster and external index synchronization support. It supports also SQL JDBC access to Knowledge Graph and GraphQL over SPARQL.

JavaScript DBMS with an API inspired by CouchDB

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

Primary database model

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

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	3.25
Rank	#91	Overall
	#7	Graph DBMS
	#4	RDF stores

Score	2.34
Rank	#112	Overall
	#21	Document stores

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	111.41
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Website

github.com/apple/foundationdb

Technical documentation

apple.github.io/foundationdb

graphdb.ontotext.com/documentation

pouchdb.com/guides

sphinxsearch.com/docs

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

Social network pages

Developer

FoundationDB

Ontotext

Apache Software Foundation

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Initial release

2013

2000

2012

2001

2000

Current release

6.2.28, November 2020

10.4, October 2023

7.1.1, June 2019

3.5.1, February 2023

3.46.0 (23 May 2024), May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Some plugins of GraphDB Workbench are open sourced

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

Public Domain

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.

Implementation language

C++

Java

JavaScript

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM
Linux
OS X
Windows

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

server-less

Data scheme

schema-free

some layers support schemas

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support; RDF shapes

schema-free

yes

dynamic column types

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

some layers support typing

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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.

Secondary indexes

yes, supports real-time synchronization and indexing in SOLR/Elastic search/Lucene and GeoSPARQL geometry data indexes

yes

via views

yes

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

supported in specific SQL layer only

stored SPARQL accessed as SQL using Apache Calcite through JDBC/ODBC

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

APIs and other access methods

GeoSPARQL
GraphQL
GraphQL Federation
Java API
JDBC
RDF4J API
RDFS
RIO
Sail API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL 1.1

HTTP REST

only for PouchDB Server
JavaScript API

Proprietary protocol

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

.Net
C#
Clojure
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

JavaScript

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

in SQL-layer only

well-defined plugin interfaces; JavaScript server-side extensibility

View functions in JavaScript

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

with a proxy-based framework, named couchdb-lounge

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication

also with CouchDB databases
Source-replica replication

also with CouchDB databases

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Linearizable consistency

Immediate Consistency, Eventual consistency (configurable in cluster mode per master or individual client request)

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

in SQL-layer only

yes

Constraint checking

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

via file-system locks

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using IndexedDB, WebSQL or LevelDB as backend

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

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

Default Basic authentication through RDF4J client, or via Java when run with cURL, default token-based in the Workbench or via Rest API, optional access through OpenID or Kerberos single sign-on.

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Ontotext GraphDB is a semantic database engine that allows organizations to build...
» more

Competitive advantages

GraphDB allows you to link text and data in big knowledge graphs. It’s easy to experiment...
» more

Typical application scenarios

Metadata enrichment and management, linked data publishing, semantic inferencing...
» more

Key customers

GraphDB provides a platform for building next-generation AI and Knowledge Graph...
» more

Market metrics

GraphDB is the most utilized semantic triplestore for mission-critical enterprise...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

GraphDB Free is a non-commercial version and is free to use. GraphDB Enterprise edition...
» more

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and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.