DBMS > 4D vs. Elasticsearch vs. HEAVY.AI vs. MySQL vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Elasticsearch vs. HEAVY.AI vs. MySQL vs. Weaviate

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

A distributed, RESTful modern search and analytics engine based on Apache Lucene

Elasticsearch lets you perform and combine many types of searches such as structured, unstructured, geo, and metric

A high performance, column-oriented RDBMS, specifically developed to harness the massive parallelism of modern CPU and GPU hardware

Widely used open source RDBMS

An AI-native realtime vector database engine that integrates scalable machine learning models.

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS

DB-Engines Ranking measures the popularity of database management systems
Trend Chart

Score	2.47
Rank	#110	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	132.83
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	1.64
Rank	#145	Overall
	#67	Relational DBMS

Score	1061.34
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	1.52
Rank	#153	Overall
	#6	Vector DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

github.com/heavyai/heavydb
www.heavy.ai

www.mysql.com

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/index.html

docs.heavy.ai

dev.mysql.com/doc

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

4D, Inc

Elastic

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

1984

2010

2016

1995

2019

Current release

v20, April 2023

8.6, January 2023

5.10, January 2022

8.4.0, April 2024

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Elastic License

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate Enterprise

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Aiven for MySQL: Fully managed MySQL, deployable in the cloud of your choice, with seamless integrations and lightning-fast setup.

Implementation language

Java

C++ and CUDA

C and C++

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

yes

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, int, float, geo point, date, cross reference, fuzzy references

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

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

all data objects are indexed in a semantic vector space (the Contextionary), all primitive fields are indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

SQL-like query language

yes

with proprietary extensions

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

.Net
Groovy
Community Contributed Clients
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

proprietary syntax

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Round robin

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

yes

Multi-source replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

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.

Memcached and Redis integration

yes

User concepts

Access control

Users and groups

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
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Competitive advantages

Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
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Typical application scenarios

As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
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Key customers

All companies that have data.
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Market metrics

As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
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Licensing and pricing models

Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
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