DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Datomic vs. MySQL vs. NSDb vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Datomic vs. MySQL vs. NSDb vs. Sphinx

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

Widely used open source RDBMS

Scalable, High-performance Time Series DBMS designed for Real-time Analytics on top of Kubernetes

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

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Time Series DBMS

Search engine

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial 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	1083.74
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#41	Time Series DBMS

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

docs.datomic.com

dev.mysql.com/doc

nsdb.io/Architecture

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Amazon

Cognitect

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2012

1995

2017

2001

Current release

1.0.6735, June 2023

8.4.0, April 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

commercial

limited edition free

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

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Implementation language

Java, Clojure

C and C++

Java, Scala

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

All OS with a Java VM

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
macOS

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes: int, bigint, decimal, string

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 fields are automatically indexed

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

with proprietary extensions

SQL-like query language

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

gRPC
HTTP REST
WebSocket

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Clojure
Java

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Java
Scala

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Transaction Functions

yes

proprietary syntax

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

By using transaction functions

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

But extensive use of caching in the application peers

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

Sharding

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

none

But extensive use of caching in the application peers

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

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

not for MyISAM storage engine

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

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

yes

Using Apache Lucene

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.

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)

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

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