DBMS > Alibaba Cloud PolarDB vs. Elasticsearch vs. EXASOL vs. GigaSpaces vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Alibaba Cloud PolarDB vs. Elasticsearch vs. EXASOL vs. GigaSpaces vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A cloud-native relational database compatible with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle. Designed for business critical applications.

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

High-performance, in-memory, MPP database specifically designed for in-memory analytics.

High performance in-memory data grid platform, powering three products: Smart Cache, Smart ODS (Operational Data Store), Smart Augmented Transactions

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Document store
Object oriented DBMS

Values are user defined objects

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Graph DBMS
Search engine

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

Score	0.66
Rank	#235	Overall
	#108	Relational DBMS

Score	132.83
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	1.76
Rank	#139	Overall
	#62	Relational DBMS

Score	1.03
Rank	#188	Overall
	#32	Document stores
	#6	Object oriented DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

www.alibabacloud.com/product/polardb

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

www.exasol.com

www.gigaspaces.com

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/polardb/product-overview

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

www.exasol.com/resources

docs.gigaspaces.com/latest/landing.html

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Alibaba

Elastic

Exasol

Gigaspaces Technologies

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2010

2000

2014

Current release

8.6, January 2023

15.5, September 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2; Commercial licenses available

commercial

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

Java

Java, C++, .Net

Server operating systems

hosted

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

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

yes

schema-free

yes

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

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

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 can be used for describing objects metadata

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language

yes

SQL-99 for query and DML statements

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

.Net
JDBC
ODBC
WebSocket

GigaSpaces LRMI
Hibernate
JCache
JDBC
JPA
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Java
Python

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

Java
Lua
Python
R

.Net
C++
Java
Python
Scala

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

yes, event driven architecture

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Multi-source replication

synchronous or asynchronous
Source-replica replication

synchronous or asynchronous

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

yes

Hadoop integration

yes

Map-Reduce pattern can be built with XAP task executors

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

Consistency level configurable: ALL, QUORUM, ANY

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

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.

yes

Memcached and Redis integration

yes

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights for users, groups and roles according to SQL-standard

Role-based access control

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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Competitive advantages

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Typical application scenarios

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Licensing and pricing models

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