DBMS > FoundationDB vs. LevelDB vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. SAP SQL Anywhere

System Properties Comparison FoundationDB vs. LevelDB vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. SAP SQL Anywhere

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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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

Embeddable fast key-value storage library that provides an ordered mapping from string keys to string values

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Widely used in-process key-value store

RDBMS database and synchronization technologies for server, desktop, remote office, and mobile environments

Primary database model

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Key-value store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Key-value store

supports sorted and unsorted key sets
Native XML DBMS

in the Oracle Berkeley DB XML version

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	2.25
Rank	#115	Overall
	#19	Key-value stores

Score	27.71
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	2.01
Rank	#126	Overall
	#21	Key-value stores
	#3	Native XML DBMS

Score	3.95
Rank	#80	Overall
	#42	Relational DBMS

Website

github.com/apple/foundationdb

github.com/google/leveldb

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/berkeleydb.html

www.sap.com/products/technology-platform/sql-anywhere.html

Technical documentation

apple.github.io/foundationdb

github.com/google/leveldb/blob/main/doc/index.md

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

docs.oracle.com/cd/E17076_05/html/index.html

help.sap.com/docs/SAP_SQL_Anywhere

Developer

FoundationDB

Google

Microsoft

Oracle

originally developed by Sleepycat, which was acquired by Oracle

SAP

formerly Sybase

Initial release

2013

2011

2014

1994

1992

Current release

6.2.28, November 2020

1.23, February 2021

18.1.40, May 2020

17, July 2015

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

BSD

commercial

Open Source

commercial license available

commercial

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++

C, Java, C++ (depending on the Berkeley DB edition)

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

Illumos
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

AIX
Android
FreeBSD
iOS
Linux
OS X
Solaris
VxWorks
Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

some layers support schemas

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

some layers support typing

yes

JSON types

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

only with the Berkeley DB XML edition

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

supported in specific SQL layer only

SQL-like query language

yes

SQL interfaced based on SQLite is available

yes

APIs and other access methods

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

ADO.NET
HTTP API
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

C++
Go
Java

3rd party binding
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party binding
Python

3rd party binding

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

.Net

Figaro is a .Net framework assembly that extends Berkeley DB XML into an embeddable database engine for .NET
others

Third-party libraries to manipulate Berkeley DB files are available for many languages
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party binding
Perl
Python
Tcl

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

in SQL-layer only

JavaScript

yes, in C/C++, Java, .Net or Perl

Triggers

JavaScript

yes

only for the SQL API

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

none

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Source-replica replication

Database mirroring

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Linearizable consistency

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session 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

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

with automatic compression on writes

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

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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