DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. FoundationDB vs. HyperSQL vs. MySQL vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. FoundationDB vs. HyperSQL vs. MySQL vs. Sphinx

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market. As a consequence, the product was removed from the DB-Engines ranking. In April 2018, Apple open-sourced FoundationDB and it therefore reappears in the ranking.

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

Ordered key-value store. Core features are complimented by layers.

Multithreaded, transactional RDBMS written in Java

also known as HSQLDB

Widely used open source RDBMS

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

Primary database model

Search engine

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Search engine

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	135.35
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	1.03
Rank	#190	Overall
	#31	Document stores
	#28	Key-value stores
	#89	Relational DBMS

Score	3.49
Rank	#87	Overall
	#47	Relational DBMS

Score	1083.74
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

github.com/apple/foundationdb

hsqldb.org

www.mysql.com

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

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

apple.github.io/foundationdb

hsqldb.org/web/hsqlDocsFrame.html

dev.mysql.com/doc

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Elastic

FoundationDB

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2010

2013

2001

1995

2001

Current release

8.6, January 2023

6.2.28, November 2020

2.7.2, June 2023

8.4.0, April 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

based on BSD license

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

Java

C++

Java

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

Embedded (into Java applications) and Client-Server operating modes

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

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

schema-free

some layers support schemas

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

some layers support typing

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

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

supported in specific SQL layer only

yes

with proprietary extensions

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

HTTP API

JDBC via HTTP
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

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

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC
Java

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

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

in SQL-layer only

Java, SQL

yes

proprietary syntax

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

Sharding

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

none

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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

Linearizable consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

in SQL-layer only

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

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.

Memcached and Redis integration

yes

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

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