DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Elasticsearch vs. HEAVY.AI vs. NSDb vs. XTDB

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Elasticsearch vs. HEAVY.AI vs. NSDb vs. XTDB

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 high performance, column-oriented RDBMS, specifically developed to harness the massive parallelism of modern CPU and GPU hardware

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

A general purpose database with bitemporal SQL and Datalog and graph queries

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

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	132.83
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	1.64
Rank	#145	Overall
	#67	Relational DBMS

Score	0.08
Rank	#369	Overall
	#40	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.18
Rank	#332	Overall
	#46	Document stores

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

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

nsdb.io

github.com/xtdb/xtdb
www.xtdb.com

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

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

docs.heavy.ai

nsdb.io/Architecture

www.xtdb.com/docs

Developer

Amazon

Elastic

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

Juxt Ltd.

Initial release

2012

2010

2016

2017

2019

Current release

8.6, January 2023

5.10, January 2022

1.19, September 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

Open Source

Elastic License

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

MIT License

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 CUDA

Java, Scala

Clojure

Server operating systems

hosted

All OS with a Java VM

Linux

Linux
macOS

All OS with a Java 8 (and higher) VM
Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

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

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes: int, bigint, decimal, string

yes, extensible-data-notation format

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

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

SQL-like query language

limited SQL, making use of Apache Calcite

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

gRPC
HTTP REST
WebSocket

HTTP REST
JDBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

Java
Scala

Clojure
Java

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

Round robin

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication

yes, each node contains all data

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

Eventual Consistency

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

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

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 Apache Lucene

yes, flexibel persistency by using storage technologies like Apache Kafka, RocksDB or LMDB

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)

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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