DBMS > FoundationDB vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. Realm vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison FoundationDB vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. Realm vs. Snowflake

Please select another system to include it in the comparison.

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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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

Widely used in-process key-value store

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

Key-value store

supports sorted and unsorted key sets
Native XML DBMS

in the Oracle Berkeley DB XML version

Document store

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	2.21
Rank	#117	Overall
	#20	Key-value stores
	#3	Native XML DBMS

Score	7.60
Rank	#52	Overall
	#9	Document stores

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

github.com/apple/foundationdb

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

realm.io

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

apple.github.io/foundationdb

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

realm.io/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

FoundationDB

Oracle

originally developed by Sleepycat, which was acquired by Oracle

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2013

1994

2014

Current release

6.2.28, November 2020

18.1.40, May 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

commercial license available

Open Source

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

AIX
Android
FreeBSD
iOS
Linux
OS X
Solaris
VxWorks
Windows

Android
Backend: server-less
iOS
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

some layers support schemas

schema-free

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

only with the Berkeley DB XML edition

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

supported in specific SQL layer only

yes

SQL interfaced based on SQLite is available

yes

APIs and other access methods

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

.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

.Net
Java

with Android only
Objective-C
React Native
Swift

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

in SQL-layer only

runs within the applications so server-side scripts are unnecessary

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

only for the SQL API

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

Source-replica replication

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

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

yes

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

More information provided by the system vendor

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.