DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. GigaSpaces vs. Heroic vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. GigaSpaces vs. Heroic vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx

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 data grid platform, powering three products: Smart Cache, Smart ODS (Operational Data Store), Smart Augmented Transactions

Time Series DBMS built at Spotify based on Cassandra or Google Cloud Bigtable, and ElasticSearch

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

Search engine

Document store
Object oriented DBMS

Values are user defined objects

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Graph DBMS
Search engine

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

Score	132.83
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	1.03
Rank	#188	Overall
	#32	Document stores
	#6	Object oriented DBMS

Score	0.46
Rank	#265	Overall
	#22	Time Series DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

www.gigaspaces.com

github.com/spotify/heroic

www.snowflake.com

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

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

docs.gigaspaces.com/latest/landing.html

spotify.github.io/heroic

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Elastic

Gigaspaces Technologies

Spotify

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2010

2000

2014

2001

Current release

8.6, January 2023

15.5, September 2020

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

Open Source

Apache Version 2; Commercial licenses available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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.

Implementation language

Java

Java, C++, .Net

Java

C++

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

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

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.

XML can be used for describing objects metadata

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

via Elasticsearch

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

SQL-99 for query and DML statements

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

GigaSpaces LRMI
Hibernate
JCache
JDBC
JPA
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data

HQL (Heroic Query Language, a JSON-based language)
HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

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

.Net
C++
Java
Python
Scala

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes, event driven architecture

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes

Sharding

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication

synchronous or asynchronous
Source-replica replication

synchronous or asynchronous

yes

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

yes

Map-Reduce pattern can be built with XAP task executors

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

Consistency level configurable: ALL, QUORUM, ANY

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

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

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

Role-based access control

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

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