DBMS > FoundationDB vs. H2 vs. Realm vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison FoundationDB vs. H2 vs. Realm 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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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.

Full-featured RDBMS with a small footprint, either embedded into a Java application or used as a database server.

A DBMS built for use on mobile devices that’s a fast, easy to use alternative to SQLite and Core Data

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

Relational DBMS

Document store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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	8.33
Rank	#46	Overall
	#30	Relational DBMS

Score	7.41
Rank	#52	Overall
	#8	Document stores

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

github.com/apple/foundationdb

www.h2database.com

realm.io

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

apple.github.io/foundationdb

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

realm.io/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

FoundationDB

Thomas Mueller

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2013

2005

2014

Current release

6.2.28, November 2020

2.2.220, July 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

dual-licence (Mozilla public license, Eclipse public license)

Open Source

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++

Java

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

Android
Backend: server-less
iOS
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

some layers support schemas

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

JDBC
ODBC

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

Java

.Net
Java

with Android only
Objective-C
React Native
Swift

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

in SQL-layer only

Java Stored Procedures and User-Defined Functions

runs within the applications so server-side scripts are unnecessary

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

Change Listeners

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

With clustering: 2 database servers on different computers operate on identical copies of a database

none

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (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

In-Memory realm

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes

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

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