DBMS > Apache Impala vs. Elasticsearch vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. MySQL

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. Elasticsearch vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. MySQL

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

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

Cloud-hosted realtime document store. iOS, Android, and JavaScript clients share one Realtime Database instance and automatically receive updates with the newest data.

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

Widely used open source RDBMS

Primary database model

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Secondary database models

Document store

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Vector DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	14.03
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	134.78
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	15.00
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	5.71
Rank	#64	Overall
	#8	Search engines

Score	1087.72
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Website

impala.apache.org

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

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

www.mysql.com

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

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

firebase.google.com/docs/database

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

dev.mysql.com/doc

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Elastic

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Microsoft

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Initial release

2013

2010

2012

2015

1995

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

8.6, January 2023

8.3.0, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C++

Java

C and C++

Server operating systems

Linux

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

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

schema-free

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

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

SQL-like query language

yes

with proprietary extensions

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

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

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

yes

limited functionality with using 'rules'

yes

proprietary syntax

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

query execution via MapReduce

ES-Hadoop Connector

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

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

Transaction concepts

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

yes

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

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

based on Apache Sentry and Kerberos

yes, based on authentication and database rules

yes

using Azure authentication

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

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