DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. NebulaGraph vs. searchxml vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. NebulaGraph vs. searchxml 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

A horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service. It is the externalization of the core Google database that runs the biggest aspects of Google, like Ads and Google Play.

A distributed, linear scalable, high perfomant Graph DBMS

DBMS for structured and unstructured content wrapped with an application server

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

Primary database model

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS

Native XML DBMS
Search engine

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

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

Score	132.83
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	2.84
Rank	#100	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Score	2.23
Rank	#116	Overall
	#10	Graph DBMS

Score	0.03
Rank	#390	Overall
	#7	Native XML DBMS
	#24	Search engines

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

cloud.google.com/spanner

github.com/vesoft-inc/nebula
www.nebula-graph.io

www.searchxml.net/category/products

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

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

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

docs.nebula-graph.io

www.searchxml.net/support/handouts

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Elastic

Google

Vesoft Inc.

informationpartners gmbh

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2010

2017

2019

2015

2014

Current release

8.6, January 2023

1.0

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0 + Common Clause 1.0

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

C++

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Linux

Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

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

yes

Strong typed schema

schema-free

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

Nebula Graph internally uses the Key-Value store RocksDB for persistency. The vertices, edges, and their properties are stored as Key while their values are stored as Value. The primary indexes are per Key and secondary indexes are per Value.

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

SQL-like query language

yes

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

Browser interface
console (shell)
Cypher Query Language
GO Object Graph Mapper
Java Object Graph Mapper
NGBatis

ORM framework for NebulaGraph and Spring-Boot
Proprietary native API
Python Object Graph Mapper
Query language nGQL

RESTful HTTP API
WebDAV
XQuery
XSLT

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

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

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net
C++
Go
Java
PHP
Python

C++

most other programming languages supported via APIs

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

yes

on the application server

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

yes

sychronisation to multiple collections

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

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

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

multiple readers, single writer

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

using RocksDB

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 Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Role-based access control

Domain, group and role-based access control at the document level and for application services

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

NebulaGraph is a truly distributed, linearly scalable, lightning-fast graph database,...
» more

Competitive advantages

NebulaGraph boasts the world's only graph database solution that is able to host...
» more

Typical application scenarios

Social networking Fraud detection Knowledge graph Data warehouse management Anti...
» more

Key customers

Companies from a variety of industries have implemented NebulaGraph Database in production,...
» more

Market metrics

At our very early stage, NebulaGraph has already received over 10,000 stars on GitHub...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

NebulaGraph is open source and free to use under Apache 2.0 license.
» 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.