DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Datomic vs. EXASOL vs. OpenSearch vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Datomic vs. EXASOL vs. OpenSearch vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Datomic builds on immutable values, supports point-in-time queries and uses 3rd party systems for durability

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

A distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine forked from Elasticsearch and based on Apache Lucene

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

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

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

Score	74.07
Rank	#17	Overall
	#3	Document stores
	#2	Key-value stores

Score	1.59
Rank	#150	Overall
	#69	Relational DBMS

Score	1.99
Rank	#124	Overall
	#58	Relational DBMS

Score	16.36
Rank	#37	Overall
	#4	Search engines

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

www.datomic.com

www.exasol.com

github.com/opensearch-project
opensearch.org

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

docs.datomic.com

www.exasol.com/resources

opensearch.org/docs/latest

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Amazon

Cognitect

Exasol

Amazon Web Services

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2012

2000

2021

2014

Current release

1.0.6735, June 2023

2.5.0, January 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

commercial

limited edition free

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

Java, Clojure

Java

Server operating systems

hosted

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

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

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language

yes

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

.Net
JDBC
ODBC
WebSocket

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Clojure
Java

Java
Lua
Python
R

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

Elasticsearch client

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Transaction Functions

user defined functions

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

By using transaction functions

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

But extensive use of caching in the application peers

Sharding

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

none

But extensive use of caching in the application peers

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

yes

Hadoop integration

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

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

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

using external storage systems (e.g. Cassandra, DynamoDB, PostgreSQL, Couchbase and others)

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

recommended only for testing and development

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 according to SQL-standard

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

OpenSearch is a highly scalable and extensible open-source software suite for search,...
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Competitive advantages

Distributed as fully open source under Apache License, Version 2.0 (ALv2), OpenSearch...
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Typical application scenarios

The OpenSearch platform is used across a broad range of search , analytics, and observability...
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Licensing and pricing models

The OpenSearch Project offers open source software licensed under Apache License...
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