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

System Properties Comparison Alibaba Cloud PolarDB vs. Elasticsearch vs. EXASOL vs. ScyllaDB 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.

Cassandra and DynamoDB compatible wide column store

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

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Key-value store

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	4.08
Rank	#76	Overall
	#5	Wide column stores

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

www.alibabacloud.com/product/polardb

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

www.exasol.com

www.scylladb.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.scylladb.com

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Alibaba

Elastic

Exasol

ScyllaDB

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2010

2000

2015

2014

Current release

8.6, January 2023

ScyllaDB Open Source 5.4.1, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

Open Source

Open Source (AGPL), commercial license 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.

Scylla Cloud: Create real-time applications that run at global scale with Scylla Cloud, the industry’s most powerful NoSQL DBaaS

Implementation language

Java

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

All OS with a Java VM

Linux

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

Secondary indexes

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

cluster global secondary indices

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language

yes

SQL-like DML and DDL statements (CQL)

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

.Net
JDBC
ODBC
WebSocket

Proprietary protocol (CQL)

compatible with CQL (Cassandra Query Language, an SQL-like language)
RESTful HTTP API (DynamoDB compatible)
Thrift

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Java
Python

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

Java
Lua
Python
R

For CQL interface: C#, C++, Clojure, Erlang, Go, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Node.js, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, Scala
For DynamoDB interface: .Net, ColdFusion, Erlang, Groovy, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

yes, Lua

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

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

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

yes

Hadoop integration

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
Tunable Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

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

in-memory tables

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

Access rights for users can be defined per object

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

PolarDB, previously ApsaraDB for PolarDB, is a cloud-native relational database designed...
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ScyllaDB is engineered to deliver predictable performance at scale. It’s adopted...
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Competitive advantages

Webinar: Top Scientists Live: Tech Secrets to Double 11's Success Revealed. White...
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Highly-performant (efficiently utilizes full resources of a node and network; millions...
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Typical application scenarios

Creating a Robust Cloud-Based Database for Fintech, E-Commerce and Gaming. Learn...
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ScyllaDB is ideal for applications that require high throughput and low latency at...
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Key customers

Discord, Epic Games, Expedia, Zillow, Comcast, Disney+ Hotstar, Samsung, ShareChat,...
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Market metrics

ScyllaDB typically offers ~75% total cost of ownership savings, with ~5X higher throughput...
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Licensing and pricing models

Specification and pricing. You can use either of the following billing methods to...
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ScyllaDB Open Source - free open source software (AGPL) ScyllaDB Enterprise - subscription-based...
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and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.