DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. H2 vs. Oracle vs. Sphinx vs. Virtuoso

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. H2 vs. Oracle vs. Sphinx vs. Virtuoso

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

Full-featured RDBMS with a small footprint, either embedded into a Java application or used as a database server.

Widely used RDBMS

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

Virtuoso is a multi-model hybrid-RDBMS that supports management of data represented as relational tables and/or property graphs

Primary database model

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Document store
Graph DBMS
Native XML DBMS
Relational DBMS
RDF store
Search engine

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
RDF store

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
Spatial DBMS

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
Vector DBMS

since Oracle 23

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	135.35
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	8.13
Rank	#49	Overall
	#31	Relational DBMS

Score	1236.29
Rank	#1	Overall
	#1	Relational DBMS

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	4.26
Rank	#78	Overall
	#13	Document stores
	#4	Graph DBMS
	#2	Native XML DBMS
	#42	Relational DBMS
	#2	RDF stores
	#9	Search engines

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

www.h2database.com

www.oracle.com/database

sphinxsearch.com

virtuoso.openlinksw.com

Technical documentation

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

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

docs.oracle.com/en/database

sphinxsearch.com/docs

docs.openlinksw.com/virtuoso

Developer

Elastic

Thomas Mueller

Oracle

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

OpenLink Software

Initial release

2010

2005

1980

2001

1998

Current release

8.6, January 2023

2.2.220, July 2023

23c, September 2023

3.5.1, February 2023

7.2.11, September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

Open Source

dual-licence (Mozilla public license, Eclipse public license)

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

GPLv2, extended commercial license available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Implementation language

Java

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows
z/OS

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

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

yes

Schemaless in JSON and XML columns

yes

SQL - Standard relational schema
RDF - Quad (S, P, O, G) or Triple (S, P, O)
XML - DTD, XML Schema
DAV - freeform filesystem objects, plus User Defined Types a/k/a Dynamic Extension Type

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

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

with proprietary extensions

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

SQL-92, SQL-200x, SQL-3, SQLX

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

Proprietary protocol

ADO.NET
GeoSPARQL
HTTP API
JDBC
Jena RDF API
ODBC
OLE DB
RDF4J API
RESTful HTTP API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SOAP webservices
SPARQL 1.1
WebDAV
XPath
XQuery
XSLT

Supported programming languages

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

Java

C
C#
C++
Clojure
Cobol
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Fortran
Groovy
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Objective C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Tcl
Visual Basic

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

.Net
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Visual Basic

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Java Stored Procedures and User-Defined Functions

PL/SQL

also stored procedures in Java possible

yes

Virtuoso PL

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

Sharding

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

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

With clustering: 2 database servers on different computers operate on identical copies of a database

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

Chain, star, and bi-directional replication
Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

can be realized in PL/SQL

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

isolation level can be parameterized

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

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

Version 12c introduced the new option 'Oracle Database In-Memory'

yes

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Fine-grained Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) in addition to typical coarse-grained Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) according to SQL-standard. Pluggable authentication with supported standards (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos)

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Virtuoso is a modern multi-model RDBMS for managing data represented as tabular relations...
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Competitive advantages

Performance & Scale — as exemplified by DBpedia and the LOD Cloud it spawned, i.e.,...
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Typical application scenarios

Used for — Analytics/BI Conceptual Data Virtualization Enterprise Knowledge Graphs...
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Key customers

Broad use across enterprises and governments including — European Union (EU) US Government...
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Market metrics

Largest installed-base of Multi-Model RDBMS for AI-friendly Knowledge Graphs Platform...
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Licensing and pricing models

Available in both Commercial Enterprise and Open Source (GPL v2) Editions Feature...
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