Many companies today run mixed NoSQL systems such as MongoDB or Cassandra and use them to perform various activities with the storage and flow of data. Buyers more recent to the NoSQL market are likely to select MongoDB; however, veterans of several years, and burned at the transactional issues and problems of consistency, may be looking for products that spend more time on transactional integrity.

In an effort to combine the best of both database technologies, database platform startup FoundationDB is announcing the general availability of its ACID (Atomic, Consistent, Isolated, Durable) compliant, NoSQL database as well as new pricing options including a free Community License.

The fast NoSQL database that scales and supports ACID transactions supports global transactions over any number of keys. FoundationDB allows the database many clients to execute a transaction without locking the same time and check all transactions for conflicts.

“With the launch of FoundationDB we are delivering the first commercial distributed NoSQL database with high performance ACID transactions and the first to offer true data model flexibility,” said Dave Rosenthal, co-founder of FoundationDB. “With the launch of FoundationDB we have redefined the price/performance/capability equation for NoSQL—with no compromises, no shortcuts, and no excuses for our competition.”

FoundationDB delivers a storage substrate applicable to a variety of data problems. Software stores data as simple key-value pairs, and offers a wide range of data models, including models for saving charts, documents, reports, spreadsheets and associated reports. To store the data, FoundationDB relies on a distributed shared architecture. The data is packed into small packets and then distributed in the form of multiple copies in the cluster.

In addition, it offers a model for storing graphs as Neo4J, documents such as MongoDB, as well as arrays, tables, and associative arrays. FoundationDB supports Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows and includes APIs for C, Python, Ruby, Node.js and Java.

Best database at the lowest price

A lot of commercial software vendors offer a free license, but they’ve limited all the features. FoundationDB’s new free Community License can allow up to six processes to be used in production and the ability to access to FoundationDB’s high performance ACID transactions, exceptional fault tolerance, and access to multiple open source layers. The commercial licensing and support that is priced starting at the disruptively low price of $99 per process per month.

“Commercial databases are infamous for obfuscating how pricing works and being difficult to deal with,” said cofounder Nick Lavezzo. “It costs $3,600 per year for three servers running FoundationDB. Oracle charges $252,000 per year to run three Oracle rack servers clustered together.”

NoSQL data stores have grown in popularity over the past few years for its ability to easily scale across multiple nodes. Aerospike recently released Aerospike 3 that adds support for distributed aggregations, complex and large data types and queries for NoSQL database. Oracle’s latest version of its MySQL open source database offers a NoSQL memcached based API for faster data access.