DBMS > Amazon Redshift vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. NSDb vs. Sphinx vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison Amazon Redshift vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. NSDb vs. Sphinx vs. Weaviate

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Large scale data warehouse service for use with business intelligence tools

Elastic, large scale data warehouse service leveraging the broad eco-system of SQL Server

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

An AI-native realtime vector database engine that integrates scalable machine learning models.

Primary database model

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

Score	17.94
Rank	#34	Overall
	#21	Relational DBMS

Score	20.56
Rank	#31	Overall
	#19	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#41	Time Series DBMS

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	1.73
Rank	#143	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/redshift

azure.microsoft.com/services/synapse-analytics

nsdb.io

sphinxsearch.com

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift

docs.microsoft.com/azure/synapse-analytics

nsdb.io/Architecture

sphinxsearch.com/docs

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

Amazon (based on PostgreSQL)

Microsoft

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2012

2016

2017

2001

2019

Current release

3.5.1, February 2023

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate Enterprise

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

C++

Java, Scala

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
macOS

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes: int, bigint, decimal, string

yes

string, int, float, geo point, date, cross reference, fuzzy references

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

restricted

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

full-text index on all search fields

yes

all data objects are indexed in a semantic vector space (the Contextionary), all primitive fields are indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

does not fully support an SQL-standard

yes

SQL-like query language

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

gRPC
HTTP REST
WebSocket

Proprietary protocol

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

C#
Java
PHP

Java
Scala

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

in Python

Transact SQL

Triggers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

Sharding

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

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

none

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

informational only, not enforced by the system

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/synapse-analytics/sql-data-warehouse/sql-data-warehouse-table-constraints

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Using Apache Lucene

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

yes

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

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
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Competitive advantages

Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
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Typical application scenarios

As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
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Key customers

All companies that have data.
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Market metrics

As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
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Licensing and pricing models

Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
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