DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Snowflake vs. XTDB

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Snowflake vs. XTDB

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 high performance, column-oriented RDBMS, specifically developed to harness the massive parallelism of modern CPU and GPU hardware

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

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

A general purpose database with bitemporal SQL and Datalog and graph queries

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS

Vector DBMS

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

Score	135.35
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	1.77
Rank	#141	Overall
	#65	Relational DBMS

Score	5.59
Rank	#63	Overall
	#7	Search engines

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	0.11
Rank	#343	Overall
	#46	Document stores

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

github.com/heavyai/heavydb
www.heavy.ai

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

www.snowflake.com

github.com/xtdb/xtdb
www.xtdb.com

Technical documentation

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

docs.heavy.ai

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

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

www.xtdb.com/docs

Developer

Elastic

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Juxt Ltd.

Initial release

2010

2016

2015

2014

2019

Current release

8.6, January 2023

5.10, January 2022

1.19, September 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

commercial

Open Source

MIT License

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++ and CUDA

Clojure

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

Linux

hosted

All OS with a Java 8 (and higher) VM
Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

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

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes, extensible-data-notation format

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 query language

yes

limited SQL, making use of Apache Calcite

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

HTTP REST
JDBC

Supported programming languages

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

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Clojure
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

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

Round robin

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

yes, each node contains all data

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

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

yes, flexibel persistency by using storage technologies like Apache Kafka, RocksDB or LMDB

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

yes

using Azure authentication

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

More information provided by the system vendor

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.