DBMS > Amazon SimpleDB vs. Elasticsearch vs. Kinetica vs. Memcached vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Amazon SimpleDB vs. Elasticsearch vs. Kinetica vs. Memcached vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Hosted simple database service by Amazon, with the data stored in the Amazon Cloud.

There is an unrelated product called SimpleDB developed by Edward Sciore

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

Fully vectorized database across both GPUs and CPUs

In-memory key-value store, originally intended for caching

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

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

Score	1.89
Rank	#128	Overall
	#22	Key-value stores

Score	128.79
Rank	#8	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	0.42
Rank	#261	Overall
	#120	Relational DBMS

Score	16.84
Rank	#32	Overall
	#4	Key-value stores

Score	133.72
Rank	#7	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/simpledb

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

www.kinetica.com

www.memcached.org

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/simpledb

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

docs.kinetica.com

github.com/memcached/memcached/wiki

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Amazon

Elastic

Kinetica

Danga Interactive

originally developed by Brad Fitzpatrick for LiveJournal

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2007

2010

2012

2003

2014

Current release

8.6, January 2023

7.1, August 2021

1.6.29, June 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

Open Source

BSD license

commercial

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, C++

Server operating systems

hosted

All OS with a Java VM

Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

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

yes

schema-free

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

All columns are indexed automatically

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

Proprietary protocol

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Erlang
Java
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

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

C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net
C
C++
ColdFusion
Erlang
Java
Lisp
Lua
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

triggers when inserted values for one or more columns fall within a specified range

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding must be implemented in the application

Sharding

none

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Source-replica replication

none

Repcached, a Memcached patch, provides this functionallity

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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 or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

Concurrent data updates can be detected by the application

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

yes

GPU vRAM or System RAM

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 and roles on table level

yes

using SASL (Simple Authentication and Security Layer) protocol

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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