DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Snowflake

Please select another system to include it in the comparison.

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

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

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

Primary database model

Search engine

Document store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Spatial 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	27.71
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

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

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Elastic

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2010

2014

Current release

8.6, January 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

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

Erlang

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

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

schema-free

yes

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

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

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

All properties auto-indexed by default

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

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

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

JavaScript

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

JavaScript

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

yes

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

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

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

atomic operations within a document possible

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

Memcached and Redis integration

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per database

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

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.