DBMS > Coveo vs. MarkLogic vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Coveo vs. MarkLogic vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Sphinx

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

AI-powered hosted search, recommendation and personalization platform providing tools for both low-code and full-code development

Operational and transactional Enterprise NoSQL database

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

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

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

Primary database model

Search engine

Document store
Native XML DBMS
RDF store

as of version 7
Search engine

Search engine

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Search engine

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.11
Rank	#118	Overall
	#11	Search engines

Score	5.18
Rank	#63	Overall
	#11	Document stores
	#1	Native XML DBMS
	#1	RDF stores
	#7	Search engines

Score	5.52
Rank	#59	Overall
	#6	Search engines

Score	27.71
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

www.coveo.com

www.marklogic.com

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

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

docs.coveo.com

docs.marklogic.com

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

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Coveo

MarkLogic Corp.

Microsoft

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2012

2001

2015

2014

2001

Current release

11.0, December 2022

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

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

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

hybrid - fields need to be configured prior to indexing, but relationships can be exploited at query time without pre-configuration

schema-free

Schema can be enforced

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON 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 properties auto-indexed by default

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL92

SQL-like query language

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

Java API
Node.js Client API
ODBC
proprietary Optic API

Proprietary Query API, introduced with version 9
RESTful HTTP API
SPARQL
WebDAV
XDBC
XQuery
XSLT

RESTful HTTP API

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

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

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

via XQuery or JavaScript

JavaScript

Triggers

yes

JavaScript

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

yes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

via Hadoop Connector, HDFS Direct Access and in-database MapReduce jobs

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

ACID

can act as a resource manager in an XA/JTA transaction

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

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.

yes, with Range Indexes

User concepts

Access control

granular access controls, API key management, content filters

Role-based access control at the document and subdocument levels

yes

using Azure authentication

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

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