DBMS > FoundationDB vs. PostgreSQL vs. RocksDB

System Properties Comparison FoundationDB vs. PostgreSQL vs. RocksDB

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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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

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

Embeddable persistent key-value store optimized for fast storage (flash and RAM)

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

Secondary database models

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	0.87
Rank	#197	Overall
	#32	Document stores
	#29	Key-value stores
	#93	Relational DBMS

Score	667.25
Rank	#4	Overall
	#4	Relational DBMS

Score	3.14
Rank	#80	Overall
	#11	Key-value stores

Website

github.com/apple/foundationdb

www.postgresql.org

rocksdb.org

Technical documentation

apple.github.io/foundationdb

www.postgresql.org/docs

github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki

Developer

FoundationDB

PostgreSQL Global Development Group

www.postgresql.org/developer

Facebook, Inc.

Initial release

2013

1989

1989: Postgres, 1996: PostgreSQL

2013

Current release

6.2.28, November 2020

16.4, August 2024

9.4.0, June 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

BSD

Open Source

BSD

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

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Implementation language

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

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

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

some layers support schemas

yes

schema-free

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

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

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

supported in specific SQL layer only

yes

standard with numerous extensions

APIs and other access methods

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

C++ API
Java API

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

C
C++
Go
Java
Perl
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.

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

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

horizontal partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

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

yes

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

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