DBMS > Amazon SimpleDB vs. Elasticsearch vs. Snowflake vs. Vertica

System Properties Comparison Amazon SimpleDB vs. Elasticsearch vs. Snowflake vs. Vertica

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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

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

Cloud or off-cloud analytical database and query engine for structured and semi-structured streaming and batch data. Machine learning platform with built-in algorithms, data preparation capabilities, and model evaluation and management via SQL or Python.

Primary database model

Key-value store

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Column oriented

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	133.72
Rank	#7	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	9.62
Rank	#42	Overall
	#26	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/simpledb

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

www.snowflake.com

www.vertica.com

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/simpledb

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

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

vertica.com/documentation

Developer

Amazon

Elastic

Snowflake Computing Inc.

OpenText

previously Micro Focus and Hewlett Packard

Initial release

2007

2010

2014

2005

Current release

8.6, January 2023

12.0.3, January 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

Limited community edition free

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

on-premises, all major clouds - Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and containers

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

hosted

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

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

yes

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

Yes, but also semi-structure/unstructured data storage, and complex hierarchical data (like Parquet) stored and/or queried.

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

No Indexes Required. Different internal optimization strategy, but same functionality included.

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

Full 1999 standard plus machine learning, time series and geospatial. Over 650 functions.

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
Kafka Connector
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API
Spark Connector
vSQL

character-based, interactive, front-end utility

Supported programming languages

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

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
R

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

yes, PostgreSQL PL/pgSQL, with minor differences

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes, called Custom Alerts

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding must be implemented in the application

Sharding

yes

horizontal partitioning, hierarchical partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication

One, or more copies of data replicated across nodes, or object-store used for repository.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

Bi-directional Spark integration

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

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

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users and roles can be defined via the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard; supports Kerberos, LDAP, Ident and hash

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