DBMS > Databricks vs. Elasticsearch vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Sphinx vs. Splunk

System Properties Comparison Databricks vs. Elasticsearch vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Sphinx vs. Splunk

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

The Databricks Lakehouse Platform combines elements of data lakes and data warehouses to provide a unified view onto structured and unstructured data. It is based on Apache Spark.

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

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

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

Analytics Platform for Big Data

Primary database model

Document store
Relational DBMS

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	78.61
Rank	#15	Overall
	#2	Document stores
	#10	Relational DBMS

Score	135.35
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	86.45
Rank	#14	Overall
	#2	Search engines

Website

www.databricks.com

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

sphinxsearch.com

www.splunk.com

Technical documentation

docs.databricks.com

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

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

sphinxsearch.com/docs

docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk

Developer

Databricks

Elastic

Microsoft

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Splunk Inc.

Initial release

2013

2010

1989

2001

2003

Current release

8.6, January 2023

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

commercial

Limited free edition and free developer edition 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

Java

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

Flexible Schema (defined schema, partial schema, schema free)

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

with Databricks SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

Splunk Search Processing Language for search commands

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

Proprietary protocol

HTTP REST

Supported programming languages

Python
R
Scala

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

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

C#
Java
JavaScript
PHP
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions and aggregates

yes

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

yes

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

Sharding

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

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

none

Multi-source replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

A 'Transaction' in Splunk has a different meaning: grouping related events into a single one for later searching

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.

Memcached and Redis integration

yes

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights for users and roles

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Supported database models : In addition to the Document store and Relational DBMS...
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