DBMS > BaseX vs. EXASOL vs. SAP HANA vs. Sphinx vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison BaseX vs. EXASOL vs. SAP HANA vs. Sphinx vs. Weaviate

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Light-weight Native XML DBMS with support for XQuery 3.0 and interactive GUI.

High-performance, in-memory, MPP database specifically designed for in-memory analytics.

In-memory, column based data store. Available as appliance or cloud service

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

An AI-native realtime vector database engine that integrates scalable machine learning models.

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS

with SAP Hana, Enterprise Edition
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	1.84
Rank	#135	Overall
	#4	Native XML DBMS

Score	1.76
Rank	#139	Overall
	#62	Relational DBMS

Score	44.27
Rank	#23	Overall
	#16	Relational DBMS

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	1.52
Rank	#153	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Website

basex.org

www.exasol.com

www.sap.com/products/hana.html

sphinxsearch.com

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

docs.basex.org

www.exasol.com/resources

help.sap.com/hana

sphinxsearch.com/docs

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

BaseX GmbH

Exasol

SAP

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2007

2000

2010

2001

2019

Current release

11.0, June 2024

2.0 SPS07 (April 4, 2023), April 2023

3.5.1, February 2023

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

BSD license

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate Enterprise

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

also available as a cloud based service

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

Linux
OS X
Windows

Appliance or cloud-service

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

XQuery supports types

yes

string, int, float, geo point, date, cross reference, fuzzy references

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

full-text index on all search fields

yes

all data objects are indexed in a semantic vector space (the Contextionary), all primitive fields are indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP API
RESTXQ
WebDAV
XML:DB
XQJ

.Net
JDBC
ODBC
WebSocket

JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

Actionscript
C
C#
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lisp
Perl
PHP
Python
Qt
Rebol
Ruby
Scala
Visual Basic

Java
Lua
Python
R

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

SQLScript, R

Triggers

yes

via events

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

yes

Sharding

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

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

yes

none

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Hadoop integration

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

multiple readers, single writer

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.

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

User concepts

Access control

Users with fine-grained authorization concept on 4 levels

Access rights for users, groups and roles according to SQL-standard

yes

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
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Competitive advantages

Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
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Typical application scenarios

As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
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Key customers

All companies that have data.
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Market metrics

As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
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Licensing and pricing models

Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
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