DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Apache Impala vs. Elasticsearch vs. SAP HANA vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Apache Impala vs. Elasticsearch vs. SAP HANA vs. Sphinx

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Hosted, scalable database service by Amazon with the data stored in Amazons cloud

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

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

In-memory, column based data store. Available as appliance or cloud service

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Secondary database models

Document store

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

with SAP Hana, Enterprise Edition
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	74.45
Rank	#17	Overall
	#3	Document stores
	#2	Key-value stores

Score	12.45
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	132.83
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	44.27
Rank	#23	Overall
	#16	Relational DBMS

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

impala.apache.org

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

www.sap.com/products/hana.html

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

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

help.sap.com/hana

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Amazon

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Elastic

SAP

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2012

2013

2010

2001

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

8.6, January 2023

2.0 SPS07 (April 4, 2023), April 2023

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

also available as a cloud based service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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

Implementation language

C++

Java

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

All OS with a Java VM

Appliance or cloud-service

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

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

yes

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

SQL-like query language

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

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

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

yes

SQLScript, R

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

selectable replication factor

yes

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

yes

query execution via MapReduce

ES-Hadoop Connector

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

Eventual Consistency

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

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

ACID across one or more tables within a single AWS account and region

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

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

Access rights for users and roles can be defined via the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Access rights for users, groups and roles

based on Apache Sentry and Kerberos

yes

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