DBMS > FoundationDB vs. Infobright vs. Postgres-XL vs. TerminusDB vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison FoundationDB vs. Infobright vs. Postgres-XL vs. TerminusDB vs. Weaviate

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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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

High performant column-oriented DBMS for analytic workloads using MySQL or PostgreSQL as a frontend

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

Scalable Graph Database platform making enterprise data available by exploiting inferred entities and relationships

An AI-native realtime vector database engine that integrates scalable machine learning models.

Primary database model

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS

Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

Document store
RDF store

DB-Engines Ranking measures the popularity of database management systems
Trend Chart

Score	0.94
Rank	#192	Overall
	#32	Document stores
	#29	Key-value stores
	#89	Relational DBMS

Score	0.86
Rank	#201	Overall
	#96	Relational DBMS

Score	0.41
Rank	#261	Overall
	#122	Relational DBMS

Score	0.15
Rank	#326	Overall
	#30	Graph DBMS

Score	1.45
Rank	#147	Overall
	#9	Vector DBMS

Website

github.com/apple/foundationdb

ignitetech.com/softwarelibrary/infobrightdb

www.postgres-xl.org

terminusdb.com

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

apple.github.io/foundationdb

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

terminusdb.github.io/terminusdb/#

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

FoundationDB

Ignite Technologies Inc.; formerly InfoBright Inc.

DataChemist Ltd.

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2013

2005

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

2018

2019

Current release

6.2.28, November 2020

10 R1, October 2018

11.0.0, January 2023

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

The open source (GPLv2) version did not support inserts/updates/deletes and was discontinued with July 2016

Open Source

Mozilla public license

Open Source

GPL V3

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate Enterprise

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++

Prolog, Rust

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
Windows

Linux
macOS

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

some layers support schemas

yes

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

some layers support typing

yes

string, int, float, geo point, date, cross reference, fuzzy references

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

Knowledge Grid Technology used instead

yes

all data objects are indexed in a semantic vector space (the Contextionary), all primitive fields are indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

supported in specific SQL layer only

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

SQL-like query language (WOQL)

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

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

OWL
RESTful HTTP API
WOQL (Web Object Query Language)

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

.Net
C
C#
C++
D
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

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

JavaScript
Python

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

in SQL-layer only

user defined functions

yes

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

horizontal partitioning

Graph Partitioning

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Source-replica replication

Journaling Streams

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

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

in SQL-layer only

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

MVCC

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

in-memory journaling

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

exploiting MySQL or PostgreSQL frontend capabilities

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Role-based access control

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
» more

Competitive advantages

Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
» more

Typical application scenarios

As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
» more

Key customers

All companies that have data.
» more

Market metrics

As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
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Licensing and pricing models

Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
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We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.

Related products and services

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More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

Weaviate, an ANN Database with CRUD support
2 February 2021, Etienne Dilocker, SeMI Technologies (sponsor)

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