DBMS > Apache Impala vs. Elasticsearch vs. MariaDB vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. Elasticsearch vs. MariaDB vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. TimescaleDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

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

MySQL application compatible open source RDBMS, enhanced with high availability, security, interoperability and performance capabilities. MariaDB ColumnStore provides a column-oriented storage engine and MariaDB Xpand supports distributed SQL.

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

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

with OQGraph storage engine
Spatial DBMS

Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	13.77
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	135.35
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	93.21
Rank	#13	Overall
	#9	Relational DBMS

Score	5.59
Rank	#63	Overall
	#7	Search engines

Score	4.64
Rank	#71	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Website

impala.apache.org

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

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

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

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

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

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

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Elastic

MariaDB Corporation Ab (MariaDB Enterprise),
MariaDB Foundation (community MariaDB Server)

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

Microsoft

Timescale

Initial release

2013

2010

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

2015

2017

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

8.6, January 2023

11.3.2, February 2024

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

Elastic License

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription available

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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

C and C++

Server operating systems

Linux

All OS with a Java VM

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

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

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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 search fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

SQL-like query language

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

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

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Eiffel
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

yes

PL/SQL compatibility added with version 10.3

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

query execution via MapReduce

ES-Hadoop Connector

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

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

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

not for in-memory storage engine

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

with MEMORY storage engine

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users, groups and roles

based on Apache Sentry and Kerberos

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes

using Azure authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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Competitive advantages

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Typical application scenarios

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Key customers

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Market metrics

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Licensing and pricing models

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