DBMS > FoundationDB vs. Postgres-XL vs. Snowflake vs. TerminusDB

System Properties Comparison FoundationDB vs. Postgres-XL vs. Snowflake vs. TerminusDB

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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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

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

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

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

Primary database model

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Relational DBMS

Graph 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	1.03
Rank	#190	Overall
	#31	Document stores
	#28	Key-value stores
	#89	Relational DBMS

Score	0.49
Rank	#256	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	0.17
Rank	#325	Overall
	#29	Graph DBMS

Website

github.com/apple/foundationdb

www.postgres-xl.org

www.snowflake.com

terminusdb.com

Technical documentation

apple.github.io/foundationdb

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

terminusdb.github.io/terminusdb/#

Developer

FoundationDB

Snowflake Computing Inc.

DataChemist Ltd.

Initial release

2013

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

2014

2018

Current release

6.2.28, November 2020

10 R1, October 2018

11.0.0, January 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Mozilla public license

commercial

Open Source

GPL V3

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++

Prolog, Rust

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
macOS

hosted

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

some layers support schemas

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

yes

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

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

supported in specific SQL layer only

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

yes

SQL-like query language (WOQL)

APIs and other access methods

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

OWL
RESTful HTTP API
WOQL (Web Object Query Language)

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

JavaScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

in SQL-layer only

user defined functions

yes

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

yes

Graph Partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Journaling Streams

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

MVCC

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

in-memory journaling

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

Role-based access control

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