StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Databases
  4. Databases
  5. FoundationDB vs RocksDB

FoundationDB vs RocksDB

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

FoundationDB
FoundationDB
Stacks34
Followers79
Votes21
RocksDB
RocksDB
Stacks141
Followers290
Votes11
GitHub Stars30.9K
Forks6.6K

FoundationDB vs RocksDB: What are the differences?

Key differences between FoundationDB and RocksDB

1. Scalability: FoundationDB is designed to scale horizontally, allowing it to handle increasing workloads by adding more nodes to the system. On the other hand, RocksDB is a single-node database system and lacks built-in mechanisms for distributing data and workload across multiple nodes.

2. Consistency models: FoundationDB provides strong ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) guarantees and supports multi-record distributed transactions. RocksDB, on the other hand, is optimized for high-performance and does not provide built-in distributed transaction support or strong consistency guarantees.

3. Storage engine: FoundationDB uses a log-structured merge tree (LSM) storage engine, which is optimized for high write throughput and efficient storage of large datasets. RocksDB, on the other hand, uses a similar LSM tree architecture but with additional optimizations for solid-state drives (SSDs) and in-memory storage.

4. Support for programming languages: FoundationDB provides client APIs for a wide range of programming languages, including Java, Python, Ruby, and C++. RocksDB, on the other hand, primarily focuses on providing a C++ interface, although bindings for other languages are available.

5. Fault tolerance and availability: FoundationDB is designed to be highly fault-tolerant and provides built-in mechanisms for automatic data replication and failure recovery. It can tolerate node failures and network partitions without sacrificing data consistency. RocksDB, on the other hand, lacks built-in replication and recovery mechanisms, and relies on external systems for achieving fault tolerance and high availability.

6. Community and ecosystem: FoundationDB has a vibrant and active community with a growing ecosystem of tools, libraries, and frameworks built around it. It is backed by a major tech company and benefits from ongoing development and support. RocksDB, on the other hand, has a smaller but still dedicated community and a more limited ecosystem of third-party tools and libraries.

In summary, FoundationDB and RocksDB differ in terms of scalability, consistency models, storage engines, language support, fault tolerance and availability, and community and ecosystem.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on FoundationDB, RocksDB

D
D

Feb 9, 2022

Needs adviceonMilvusMilvusHBaseHBaseRocksDBRocksDB

I am researching different querying solutions to handle ~1 trillion records of data (in the realm of a petabyte). The data is mostly textual. I have identified a few options: Milvus, HBase, RocksDB, and Elasticsearch. I was wondering if there is a good way to compare the performance of these options (or if anyone has already done something like this). I want to be able to compare the speed of ingesting and querying textual data from these tools. Does anyone have information on this or know where I can find some? Thanks in advance!

174k views174k
Comments
Karan
Karan

Senior Software Developer at Shyplite

Jan 13, 2022

Decided

So, we started using foundationDB for an OLAP system although the inbuilt tools for some core things like aggregation and filtering were negligible, with the high through put of the DB, we were able to handle it on the application. The system has been running pretty well for the past 6 months, although the data load isn’t very high yet, the performance is fairly promising

40.9k views40.9k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

FoundationDB
FoundationDB
RocksDB
RocksDB

FoundationDB is a NoSQL database with a shared nothing architecture. Designed around a "core" ordered key-value database, additional features and data models are supplied in layers. The key-value database, as well as all layers, supports full, cross-key and cross-server ACID transactions.

RocksDB is an embeddable persistent key-value store for fast storage. RocksDB can also be the foundation for a client-server database but our current focus is on embedded workloads. RocksDB builds on LevelDB to be scalable to run on servers with many CPU cores, to efficiently use fast storage, to support IO-bound, in-memory and write-once workloads, and to be flexible to allow for innovation.

Multiple data models;Full, multi-key ACID transactions;No locking;Bindings available in Python, Ruby, Node, PHP, Java, Go, and C
Designed for application servers wanting to store up to a few terabytes of data on locally attached Flash drives or in RAM;Optimized for storing small to medium size key-values on fast storage -- flash devices or in-memory;Scales linearly with number of CPUs so that it works well on ARM processors
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
30.9K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
6.6K
Stacks
34
Stacks
141
Followers
79
Followers
290
Votes
21
Votes
11
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 6
    ACID transactions
  • 5
    Linear scalability
  • 3
    Key-Value Store
  • 3
    Great Foundation
  • 3
    Multi-model database
Pros
  • 5
    Very fast
  • 3
    Made by Facebook
  • 2
    Consistent performance
  • 1
    Ability to add logic to the database layer where needed

What are some alternatives to FoundationDB, RocksDB?

MongoDB

MongoDB

MongoDB stores data in JSON-like documents that can vary in structure, offering a dynamic, flexible schema. MongoDB was also designed for high availability and scalability, with built-in replication and auto-sharding.

MySQL

MySQL

The MySQL software delivers a very fast, multi-threaded, multi-user, and robust SQL (Structured Query Language) database server. MySQL Server is intended for mission-critical, heavy-load production systems as well as for embedding into mass-deployed software.

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system that supports an extended subset of the SQL standard, including transactions, foreign keys, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types and functions.

Microsoft SQL Server

Microsoft SQL Server

Microsoft® SQL Server is a database management and analysis system for e-commerce, line-of-business, and data warehousing solutions.

SQLite

SQLite

SQLite is an embedded SQL database engine. Unlike most other SQL databases, SQLite does not have a separate server process. SQLite reads and writes directly to ordinary disk files. A complete SQL database with multiple tables, indices, triggers, and views, is contained in a single disk file.

Cassandra

Cassandra

Partitioning means that Cassandra can distribute your data across multiple machines in an application-transparent matter. Cassandra will automatically repartition as machines are added and removed from the cluster. Row store means that like relational databases, Cassandra organizes data by rows and columns. The Cassandra Query Language (CQL) is a close relative of SQL.

Memcached

Memcached

Memcached is an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) from results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering.

MariaDB

MariaDB

Started by core members of the original MySQL team, MariaDB actively works with outside developers to deliver the most featureful, stable, and sanely licensed open SQL server in the industry. MariaDB is designed as a drop-in replacement of MySQL(R) with more features, new storage engines, fewer bugs, and better performance.

RethinkDB

RethinkDB

RethinkDB is built to store JSON documents, and scale to multiple machines with very little effort. It has a pleasant query language that supports really useful queries like table joins and group by, and is easy to setup and learn.

ArangoDB

ArangoDB

A distributed free and open-source database with a flexible data model for documents, graphs, and key-values. Build high performance applications using a convenient SQL-like query language or JavaScript extensions.

Related Comparisons

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase