DBMS > FoundationDB vs. Postgres-XL vs. PostgreSQL vs. Riak KV vs. Stardog

System Properties Comparison FoundationDB vs. Postgres-XL vs. PostgreSQL vs. Riak KV vs. Stardog

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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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

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

Widely used open source RDBMS

Developed as objectoriented DBMS (Postgres), gradually enhanced with 'standards' like SQL

Distributed, fault tolerant key-value store

Enterprise Knowledge Graph platform and graph DBMS with high availability, high performance reasoning, and virtualization

Primary database model

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Relational DBMS

with object oriented extensions, e.g.: user defined types/functions and inheritance. Handling of key/value pairs with hstore module.

Key-value store

with links between data sets and object tags for the creation of secondary indexes

Graph DBMS
RDF store

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

with Apache Age
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

with pgvector extension

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	0.53
Rank	#254	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Score	636.25
Rank	#4	Overall
	#4	Relational DBMS

Score	4.01
Rank	#79	Overall
	#9	Key-value stores

Score	2.07
Rank	#122	Overall
	#11	Graph DBMS
	#6	RDF stores

Website

github.com/apple/foundationdb

www.postgres-xl.org

www.postgresql.org

www.stardog.com

Technical documentation

apple.github.io/foundationdb

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

www.postgresql.org/docs

www.tiot.jp/riak-docs/riak/kv/latest

docs.stardog.com

Developer

FoundationDB

PostgreSQL Global Development Group

www.postgresql.org/developer

OpenSource, formerly Basho Technologies

Stardog-Union

Initial release

2013

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

1989

1989: Postgres, 1996: PostgreSQL

2009

2010

Current release

6.2.28, November 2020

10 R1, October 2018

16.3, May 2024

3.2.0, December 2022

7.3.0, May 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Mozilla public license

Open Source

BSD

Open Source

Apache version 2, commercial enterprise edition

commercial

60-day fully-featured trial license; 1-year fully-featured non-commercial use license for academics/students

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

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Implementation language

C++

Erlang

Java

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
macOS

FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
NetBSD
OpenBSD
OS X
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux
OS X

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

some layers support schemas

yes

schema-free

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support

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

XML type, but no XML query functionality

yes

specific XML-type available, but no XML query functionality.

Import/export of XML data possible

Secondary indexes

yes

restricted

yes

supports real-time indexing in full-text and geospatial

SQL

Support of SQL

supported in specific SQL layer only

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

yes

standard with numerous extensions

Yes, compatible with all major SQL variants through dedicated BI/SQL Server

APIs and other access methods

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

HTTP API
Native Erlang Interface

GraphQL query language
HTTP API
Jena RDF API
OWL
RDF4J API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SNARL
SPARQL
Spring Data
Stardog Studio
TinkerPop 3

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

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

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

unofficial client library
C#
C++

unofficial client library
Clojure

unofficial client library
Dart

unofficial client library
Erlang
Go

unofficial client library
Groovy

unofficial client library
Haskell

unofficial client library
Java
JavaScript

unofficial client library
Lisp

unofficial client library
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

unofficial client library
Smalltalk

unofficial client library

.Net
Clojure
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

in SQL-layer only

user defined functions

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

Erlang

user defined functions and aggregates, HTTP Server extensions in Java

Triggers

yes

pre-commit hooks and post-commit hooks

yes

via event handlers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

partitioning by range, list and (since PostgreSQL 11) by hash

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

selectable replication factor

Multi-source replication in HA-Cluster

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Linearizable consistency

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency in HA-Cluster

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

in SQL-layer only

yes

links between data sets can be stored

yes

relationships in graphs

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 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

yes, using Riak Security

Access rights for users and roles

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.

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