DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Datomic vs. Elasticsearch vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Kinetica

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Datomic vs. Elasticsearch vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Kinetica

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

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

Fully vectorized database across both GPUs and CPUs

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS

Spatial DBMS
Time Series 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	1.66
Rank	#144	Overall
	#66	Relational DBMS

Score	132.83
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	1.64
Rank	#145	Overall
	#67	Relational DBMS

Score	0.66
Rank	#234	Overall
	#107	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

www.datomic.com

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

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

www.kinetica.com

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

docs.datomic.com

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

docs.heavy.ai

docs.kinetica.com

Developer

Amazon

Cognitect

Elastic

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

Kinetica

Initial release

2012

2010

2016

2012

Current release

1.0.7075, December 2023

8.6, January 2023

5.10, January 2022

7.1, August 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

commercial

limited edition free

Open Source

Elastic License

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition 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, Clojure

Java

C++ and CUDA

C, C++

Server operating systems

hosted

All OS with a Java VM

Linux

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

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Clojure
Java

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

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Transaction Functions

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

By using transaction functions

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

triggers when inserted values for one or more columns fall within a specified range

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

But extensive use of caching in the application peers

Sharding

Round robin

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

none

But extensive use of caching in the application peers

yes

Multi-source replication

Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

ES-Hadoop Connector

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

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

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

Memcached and Redis integration

yes

GPU vRAM or System RAM

User concepts

Access control

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights for users and roles on table level

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