DBMS > Apache Impala vs. Couchbase vs. Elasticsearch vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. Couchbase vs. Elasticsearch vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

A distributed document store with integrated cache, a powerful search engine, in-built operational and analytical capabilities, and an embedded mobile database

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

A horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service. It is the externalization of the core Google database that runs the biggest aspects of Google, like Ads and Google Play.

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

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store

Key-value store

originating from the former Membase product and supporting the Memcached protocol
Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Vector DBMS

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

Score	12.45
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	16.59
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	132.83
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	2.84
Rank	#100	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Score	5.52
Rank	#59	Overall
	#6	Search engines

Website

impala.apache.org

www.couchbase.com

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

cloud.google.com/spanner

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

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

docs.couchbase.com

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

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

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

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Couchbase, Inc.

Elastic

Google

Microsoft

Initial release

2013

2011

2010

2017

2015

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

Server: 7.2, June 2023; Mobile: 3.1, March 2022; Couchbase Capella (DBaaS), June 2023

8.6, January 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

Business Source License (BSL 1.1); Commercial licenses also available

Open Source

Elastic 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

C++

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Java

Server operating systems

Linux

Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

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

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

SQL++, extends ANSI SQL to JSON for operational, transactional, and analytic use cases

SQL-like query language

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

CLI Client
HTTP REST
Kafka Connector
Native language bindings for CRUD, Query, Search and Analytics APIs
Spark Connector
Spring Data

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

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

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

Functions and timers in JavaScript and UDFs in Java, Python, SQL++

yes

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

query execution via MapReduce

yes

ES-Hadoop Connector

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

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

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integrity

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

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.

yes

Ephemeral buckets

Memcached and Redis integration

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users, groups and roles

based on Apache Sentry and Kerberos

User and Administrator separation with password-based and LDAP integrated Authentication. Role-base access control.

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

yes

using Azure authentication

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