DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. EXASOL vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. SAP IQ vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. EXASOL vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. SAP IQ vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

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

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

Columnar RDBMS optimized for Big Data analytics

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

Primary database model

column-oriented

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Vector DBMS

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

Score	135.35
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	1.99
Rank	#124	Overall
	#58	Relational DBMS

Score	5.59
Rank	#63	Overall
	#7	Search engines

Score	2.75
Rank	#104	Overall
	#53	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

www.exasol.com

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

www.sap.com/products/technology-platform/sybase-iq-big-data-management.html

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

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

www.exasol.com/resources

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

help.sap.com/docs/SAP_IQ

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Elastic

Exasol

Microsoft

SAP, formerly Sybase

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2010

2000

2015

1994

2014

Current release

8.6, January 2023

16.1 SPS04, April 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

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

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

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

yes

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

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

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

.Net
JDBC
ODBC
WebSocket

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

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

Java
Lua
Python
R

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

C
C#
C++
Java
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

shared disk or shared nothing architectures with SAP IQ Multiplexer

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

SAP/Sybase Replication Server

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

yes

Hadoop integration

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

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

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

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

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

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.