DBMS > Datastax Enterprise vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Datastax Enterprise vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

DataStax Enterprise (DSE) is the always-on, scalable data platform built on Apache Cassandra and designed for hybrid Cloud. DSE integrates graph, search, analytics, administration, developer tooling, and monitoring into a unified platform.

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

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

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

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS
Search engine
Vector DBMS

Vector DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	5.80
Rank	#60	Overall
	#4	Wide column stores

Score	5.59
Rank	#63	Overall
	#7	Search engines

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

www.datastax.com/products/datastax-enterprise

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

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

www.snowflake.com

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

docs.datastax.com

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

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

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

DataStax

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2011

2015

1989

2014

2001

Current release

6.8, April 2020

SQL Server 2022, November 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.

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Implementation language

Java

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X

hosted

Linux
Windows

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

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

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements (CQL); Spark SQL

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

CQL (Cassandra Query Language)
TinkerPop Gremlin

with DSE Graph

RESTful HTTP API

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

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

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

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

yes

Sharding

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

configurable replication factor, datacenter aware, advanced replication for edge computing

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

yes

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency
Tunable Consistency

consistency level can be individually decided with each write operation

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

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.

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

yes

using Azure authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

DataStax Enterprise is scale-out data infrastructure for enterprises that need to...
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Competitive advantages

Supporting the following application requirements: Zero downtime - Built on Apache...
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Typical application scenarios

Applications that must be massively and linearly scalable with 100% uptime and able...
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Key customers

Capital One, Cisco, Comcast, eBay, McDonald's, Microsoft, Safeway, Sony, UBS, and...
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Market metrics

Among the Forbes 100 Most Innovative Companies, DataStax is trusted by 5 of the top...
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Licensing and pricing models

Annual subscription
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