DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. Kdb vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Sphinx vs. YugabyteDB

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. Kdb vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Sphinx vs. YugabyteDB

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

High performance Time Series DBMS

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

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

High-performance distributed SQL database for global, internet-scale applications. Wire and feature compatible with PostgreSQL.

Primary database model

Search engine

Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Wide column store

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

Score	135.35
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	7.55
Rank	#53	Overall
	#3	Time Series DBMS
	#1	Vector DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	2.91
Rank	#102	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

kx.com

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

sphinxsearch.com

www.yugabyte.com

Technical documentation

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

code.kx.com

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

sphinxsearch.com/docs

docs.yugabyte.com
github.com/yugabyte/yugabyte-db

Developer

Elastic

Kx Systems, a division of First Derivatives plc

Microsoft

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Yugabyte Inc.

Initial release

2010

2000

kdb was released 2000, kdb+ in 2003

1989

2001

2017

Current release

8.6, January 2023

3.6, May 2018

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

3.5.1, February 2023

2.19, September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

free 32-bit version

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

Java

C++

C and C++

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
OS X

Data scheme

schema-free

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

yes

depending on used data model

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

table attribute 'grouped'

yes

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

SQL-like query language (q)

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes, PostgreSQL compatible

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

HTTP API
JDBC
Jupyter
Kafka
ODBC
WebSocket

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

Proprietary protocol

JDBC
YCQL, an SQL-based flexible-schema API with its roots in Cassandra Query Language
YSQL - a fully relational SQL API that is wire compatible with the SQL language in PostgreSQL

Supported programming languages

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

C
C#
C++
Go
J
Java
JavaScript
Lua
MatLab
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Scala

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

C
C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby
Rust
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

yes

sql, plpgsql, C

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

with views

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

Sharding

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

Hash and Range Sharding, row-level geo-partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Source-replica replication

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

none

Based on Raft distributed consensus protocol, minimum 3 replicas for continuous availability

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

similar paradigm used for internal processing

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

Strong consistency on writes and tunable consistency on reads

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Distributed ACID with Serializable & Snapshot Isolation. Inspired by Google Spanner architecture.

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.

yes

based on RocksDB

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

rights management via user accounts

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Integrated columnar database & programming system for streaming, real time and historical...
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YugabyteDB is an open source distributed SQL database for cloud native transactional...
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Competitive advantages

provides seamless scalability; runs on industry standard server platforms; is top-ranked...
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PostgreSQL compatible: Get instantly productive with a PostgreSQL compatible RDBMS....
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Typical application scenarios

tick database streaming sensor data massive intelligence applications oil and gas...
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Systems of record and engagement for cloud native applications that require resilience,...
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Key customers

Goldman Sachs Morgan Stanley Merrill Lynch J.P. Morgan Deutsche Bank IEX Securities...
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Market metrics

kdb+ performance and reliability proven by our customers in critical infrastructure...
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2 Million+ lifetime clusters deployed, 6.5K+ GitHub stars, 7K YugabyteDB Community...
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Licensing and pricing models

upon request
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Apache 2.0 license for the database
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