DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. IBM Cloudant vs. MariaDB vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. QuestDB

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. IBM Cloudant vs. MariaDB vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. QuestDB

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

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

MySQL application compatible open source RDBMS, enhanced with high availability, security, interoperability and performance capabilities. MariaDB ColumnStore provides a column-oriented storage engine and MariaDB Xpand supports distributed SQL.

Database as a Service offering with high compatibility to Microsoft SQL Server

A high performance open source SQL database for time series data

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

with OQGraph storage engine
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	132.83
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	2.75
Rank	#104	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Score	91.04
Rank	#13	Overall
	#9	Relational DBMS

Score	76.78
Rank	#16	Overall
	#11	Relational DBMS

Score	2.70
Rank	#105	Overall
	#8	Time Series DBMS

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/azure-sql/database

questdb.io

Technical documentation

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

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql

questdb.io/docs

Developer

Elastic

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

MariaDB Corporation Ab (MariaDB Enterprise),
MariaDB Foundation (community MariaDB Server)

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

Microsoft

QuestDB Technology Inc

Initial release

2010

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

2010

2014

Current release

8.6, January 2023

11.3.2, February 2024

V12

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription available

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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.

STACKIT MariaDB offers MariaDB in a fully managed version in enterprise grade, 100% GDPR-compliant.

Implementation language

Java

Erlang

C and C++

C++

Java (Zero-GC), C++, Rust

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

hosted

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

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

schema-free

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

yes

schema-free via InfluxDB Line Protocol

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

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

SQL with time-series extensions

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

HTTP REST
InfluxDB Line Protocol (TCP/UDP)
JDBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol

Supported programming languages

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

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Eiffel
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

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

PostgreSQL driver
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Rust

over HTTP

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

yes

PL/SQL compatibility added with version 10.3

Transact SQL

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

horizontal partitioning (by timestamps)

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes, with always 3 replicas available

Source-replica replication with eventual consistency

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

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

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

Transaction concepts

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

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

ACID for single-table writes

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

not for in-memory storage engine

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

with MEMORY storage engine

yes

through memory mapped files

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per database

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

MariaDB is the most powerful open source relational database – modern SQL and JSON...
» more

Relational model with native time series support Column-based storage and time partitioned...
» more

Competitive advantages

MariaDB Servers have many features unavailable in other open source relational databases....
» more

High ingestion throughput: peak of 4M rows/sec (TSBS Benchmark) Code optimizations...
» more

Typical application scenarios

Web, SaaS and Cloud operational applications that require high availability, scalability...
» more

Financial tick data Industrial IoT Application Metrics Monitoring
» more

Key customers

Deutsche Bank, DBS Bank, Nasdaq, Red Hat, ServiceNow, Verizon and Walgreens Featured...
» more

Banks & Hedge funds, Yahoo, OKX, Airbus, Aquis Exchange, Net App, Cloudera, Airtel,...
» more

Market metrics

MariaDB is the default database in the LAMP stack supplied by Red Hat and SUSE Linux,...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

MariaDB plc subscriptions cover our free, open source database, Community Server,...
» more

Open source Apache 2.0 QuestDB Enterprise QuestDB Cloud
» more

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