DBMS > Amazon SimpleDB vs. Memcached vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Amazon SimpleDB vs. Memcached vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx

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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

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

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

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

Primary database model

Key-value store

Relational DBMS

Search engine

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

Score	1.88
Rank	#133	Overall
	#23	Key-value stores

Score	18.08
Rank	#32	Overall
	#4	Key-value stores

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

aws.amazon.com/simpledb

www.memcached.org

www.snowflake.com

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/simpledb

github.com/memcached/memcached/wiki

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Amazon

Danga Interactive

originally developed by Brad Fitzpatrick for LiveJournal

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2007

2003

2014

2001

Current release

1.6.27, May 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

BSD license

commercial

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

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

All columns are indexed automatically

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

Proprietary protocol

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

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

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

Triggers

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding must be implemented in the application

none

yes

Sharding

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

none

Repcached, a Memcached patch, provides this functionallity

yes

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

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

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.

User concepts

Access control

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

yes

using SASL (Simple Authentication and Security Layer) protocol

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

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