DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. EXASOL vs. Riak KV vs. Snowflake vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. EXASOL vs. Riak KV vs. Snowflake vs. Weaviate

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.

Distributed, fault tolerant key-value store

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

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

Primary database model

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

with links between data sets and object tags for the creation of secondary indexes

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial 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	4.10
Rank	#82	Overall
	#9	Key-value stores

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	1.73
Rank	#143	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

www.exasol.com

www.snowflake.com

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

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

www.exasol.com/resources

www.tiot.jp/riak-docs/riak/kv/latest

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

Elastic

Exasol

OpenSource, formerly Basho Technologies

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2010

2000

2009

2014

2019

Current release

8.6, January 2023

3.2.0, December 2022

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2, commercial enterprise edition

commercial

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate Enterprise

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

Erlang

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
OS X

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

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

yes

schema-free

yes

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

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

restricted

yes

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

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

.Net
JDBC
ODBC
WebSocket

HTTP API
Native Erlang Interface

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

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

Java
Lua
Python
R

unofficial client library
C#
C++

unofficial client library
Clojure

unofficial client library
Dart

unofficial client library
Erlang
Go

unofficial client library
Groovy

unofficial client library
Haskell

unofficial client library
Java
JavaScript

unofficial client library
Lisp

unofficial client library
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

unofficial client library
Smalltalk

unofficial client library

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

Erlang

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

pre-commit hooks and post-commit hooks

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

yes

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

selectable replication factor

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

yes

Hadoop integration

yes

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

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

links between data sets can be stored

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 Riak Security

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

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,...
» more

Competitive advantages

Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
» more

Typical application scenarios

As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
» more

Key customers

All companies that have data.
» more

Market metrics

As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

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

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.