DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Elasticsearch vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Spark SQL

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Elasticsearch vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Spark SQL

Please select another system to include it in the comparison.

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

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

Spark SQL is a component on top of 'Spark Core' for structured data processing

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

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	135.35
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	5.59
Rank	#63	Overall
	#7	Search engines

Score	18.96
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

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

spark.apache.org/sql

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

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

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

spark.apache.org/docs/latest/sql-programming-guide.html

Developer

Amazon

Elastic

Microsoft

Apache Software Foundation

Initial release

2012

2010

2015

2014

Current release

8.6, January 2023

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

Open Source

Apache 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

Scala

Server operating systems

hosted

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Linux
OS X
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

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

Java
Python
R
Scala

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

yes, utilizing Spark Core

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

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

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

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)

yes

using Azure authentication

More information provided by the system vendor

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.