DBMS > Amazon Redshift vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Solr vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Amazon Redshift vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Solr vs. Sphinx

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Large scale data warehouse service for use with business intelligence tools

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

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

A widely used distributed, scalable search engine based on Apache Lucene

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Search engine

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS

DB-Engines Ranking measures the popularity of database management systems
Trend Chart

Score	16.88
Rank	#35	Overall
	#22	Relational DBMS

Score	5.52
Rank	#59	Overall
	#6	Search engines

Score	27.71
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	41.02
Rank	#24	Overall
	#3	Search engines

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

aws.amazon.com/redshift

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

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

solr.apache.org

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift

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

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

solr.apache.org/resources.html

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Amazon (based on PostgreSQL)

Microsoft

Apache Software Foundation

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2012

2015

2014

2006

2001

Current release

9.6.1, May 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

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++

Server operating systems

hosted

All OS with a Java VM

runs as a servlet in servlet container (e.g. Tomcat, Jetty is included)

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

Dynamic Fields enables on-the-fly addition of new fields

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

yes

supports customizable data types and automatic typing

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

restricted

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

does not fully support an SQL-standard

SQL-like query language

Solr Parallel SQL Interface

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP API

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

.Net
Erlang
Java
JavaScript
any language that supports sockets and either XML or JSON
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

in Python

JavaScript

Java plugins

Triggers

JavaScript

yes

User configurable commands triggered on index changes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

spark-solr: github.com/lucidworks/spark-solr and streaming expressions to reduce

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

informational only, not enforced by the system

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

ACID

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

optimistic locking

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

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

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes

using Azure authentication

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

yes

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