DBMS > FoundationDB vs. HEAVY.AI vs. jBASE vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison FoundationDB vs. HEAVY.AI vs. jBASE vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. TimescaleDB

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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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 high performance, column-oriented RDBMS, specifically developed to harness the massive parallelism of modern CPU and GPU hardware

A robust multi-value DBMS comprising development tools and middleware

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Relational 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	1.77
Rank	#141	Overall
	#65	Relational DBMS

Score	1.41
Rank	#159	Overall
	#3	Multivalue DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	4.64
Rank	#71	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Website

github.com/apple/foundationdb

github.com/heavyai/heavydb
www.heavy.ai

www.rocketsoftware.com/products/rocket-multivalue-application-development-platform/rocket-jbase

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

apple.github.io/foundationdb

docs.heavy.ai

docs.rocketsoftware.com/bundle?labelkey=jbase_5.9

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

docs.timescale.com

Developer

FoundationDB

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

Rocket Software (formerly Zumasys)

Microsoft

Timescale

Initial release

2013

2016

1991

1989

2017

Current release

6.2.28, November 2020

5.10, January 2022

5.7

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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++

C++ and CUDA

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

AIX
Linux
Windows

Linux
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

some layers support schemas

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

some layers support typing

yes

optional

yes

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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

Embedded SQL for jBASE in BASIC

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
RESTful HTTP API
SOAP-based API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

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

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

.Net
Basic
Jabbascript
Java

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

in SQL-layer only

yes

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Round robin

Sharding

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication

yes

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

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

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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