DBMS > FoundationDB vs. Snowflake vs. YugabyteDB

System Properties Comparison FoundationDB vs. Snowflake vs. YugabyteDB

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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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

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

High-performance distributed SQL database for global, internet-scale applications. Wire and feature compatible with PostgreSQL.

Primary database model

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Wide column 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	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	2.91
Rank	#102	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Website

github.com/apple/foundationdb

www.snowflake.com

www.yugabyte.com

Technical documentation

apple.github.io/foundationdb

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.yugabyte.com
github.com/yugabyte/yugabyte-db

Developer

FoundationDB

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Yugabyte Inc.

Initial release

2013

2014

2017

Current release

6.2.28, November 2020

2.19, September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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.

YugabyteDB Managed is the fully managed database-as-a-service offering of YugabyteDB. Get started quickly, and effortlessly ensure continuous availability and limitless scale of your cloud native applications.

Implementation language

C++

C and C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
OS X

Data scheme

schema-free

some layers support schemas

yes

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

depending on used data model

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

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

supported in specific SQL layer only

yes

yes, PostgreSQL compatible

APIs and other access methods

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
YCQL, an SQL-based flexible-schema API with its roots in Cassandra Query Language
YSQL - a fully relational SQL API that is wire compatible with the SQL language in PostgreSQL

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C
C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby
Rust
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

in SQL-layer only

user defined functions

yes

sql, plpgsql, C

Triggers

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes

Hash and Range Sharding, row-level geo-partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Based on Raft distributed consensus protocol, minimum 3 replicas for continuous availability

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Linearizable consistency

Immediate Consistency

Strong consistency on writes and tunable consistency on reads

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

in SQL-layer only

yes

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

ACID

Distributed ACID with Serializable & Snapshot Isolation. Inspired by Google Spanner architecture.

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

based on RocksDB

In-memory capabilities

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

User concepts

Access control

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

yes

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

YugabyteDB is an open source distributed SQL database for cloud native transactional...
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Competitive advantages

PostgreSQL compatible: Get instantly productive with a PostgreSQL compatible RDBMS....
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Typical application scenarios

Systems of record and engagement for cloud native applications that require resilience,...
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Market metrics

2 Million+ lifetime clusters deployed, 6.5K+ GitHub stars, 7K YugabyteDB Community...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Apache 2.0 license for the database
» more

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