DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Elasticsearch vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. ObjectBox

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Elasticsearch vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. ObjectBox

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

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 horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service. It is the externalization of the core Google database that runs the biggest aspects of Google, like Ads and Google Play.

Search-as-a-service for web and mobile app development

Extremely fast embedded database for small devices, IoT and Mobile

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Vector DBMS

Time Series 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	135.35
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	5.59
Rank	#63	Overall
	#7	Search engines

Score	1.20
Rank	#170	Overall
	#5	Object oriented DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

cloud.google.com/spanner

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/search

objectbox.io

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

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

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search

docs.objectbox.io

Developer

Amazon

Elastic

Google

Microsoft

ObjectBox Limited

Initial release

2012

2010

2017

2015

2017

Current release

8.6, January 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

Open Source

Apache License 2.0

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

C and C++

Server operating systems

hosted

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Android
iOS
Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

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

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP API

Proprietary native API

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

C
C++
Dart
Go
Java
JavaScript

planned (as of Jan 2019)
Kotlin
Python

planned (as of Jan 2019)
Swift

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

online/offline synchronization between client and server

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

ES-Hadoop Connector

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

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

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on 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

Strict serializable isolation

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.

Memcached and Redis integration

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 Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

yes

using Azure authentication

yes

More information provided by the system vendor

News

The first On-Device Vector Database: ObjectBox 4.0
16 May 2024

Edge AI: The era of on-device AI
23 April 2024

In-Memory Database Use Cases
15 February 2024

Data Viewer for Objects – announcing ObjectBox Admin
14 November 2023

Vector Databases for Edge AI
9 August 2023

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