DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. Heroic vs. Informix vs. SAP HANA vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. Heroic vs. Informix vs. SAP HANA 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

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

A secure embeddable database from IBM, positioned besides IBM Db2 as a relatively low-cost product optimized for OLTP and Internet of Things data

In-memory, column based data store. Available as appliance or cloud service

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

Primary database model

Search engine

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

Since Version 12.10 support for JSON/BSON datatypes compatible with MongoDB

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

with Informix TimeSeries Extension

Document store
Graph DBMS

with SAP Hana, Enterprise Edition
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	132.83
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	0.46
Rank	#265	Overall
	#22	Time Series DBMS

Score	17.12
Rank	#34	Overall
	#21	Relational DBMS

Score	44.27
Rank	#23	Overall
	#16	Relational DBMS

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

github.com/spotify/heroic

www.ibm.com/products/informix

www.sap.com/products/hana.html

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

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

spotify.github.io/heroic

informix.hcldoc.com
www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSGU8G/welcomeIfxServers.html

help.sap.com/hana

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Elastic

Spotify

IBM, HCL Technologies

Effective May 1st, 2017, HCL took on development, technical support, and product management teams, and works jointly with IBM on product strategy, marketing, and sales.

SAP

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2010

2014

1984

2010

2001

Current release

8.6, January 2023

14.10.FC5, November 2020

2.0 SPS07 (April 4, 2023), April 2023

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

free developer edition available

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

also available as a cloud based service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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

Implementation language

Java

C, C++ and Java

C++

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

Appliance or cloud-service

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

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Since Version 12.10 support for JSON/BSON datatypes

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.

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

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

JDBC
JSON API

MongoDB compatible
MQTT (Message Queue Telemetry Transport)
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

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

.Net
C
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

SQLScript, R

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

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
Source-replica replication

yes

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

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

Users with fine-grained authentication, authorization, and auditing controls

yes

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