DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. Kinetica vs. SAP HANA vs. SAP SQL Anywhere vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. Kinetica vs. SAP HANA vs. SAP SQL Anywhere vs. Weaviate

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

Fully vectorized database across both GPUs and CPUs

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

RDBMS database and synchronization technologies for server, desktop, remote office, and mobile environments

An AI-native realtime vector database engine that integrates scalable machine learning models.

Primary database model

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

with SAP Hana, Enterprise Edition
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	135.35
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	0.64
Rank	#236	Overall
	#109	Relational DBMS

Score	44.69
Rank	#22	Overall
	#16	Relational DBMS

Score	4.25
Rank	#79	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	1.73
Rank	#143	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

www.kinetica.com

www.sap.com/products/hana.html

www.sap.com/products/technology-platform/sql-anywhere.html

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

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

docs.kinetica.com

help.sap.com/hana

help.sap.com/docs/SAP_SQL_Anywhere

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

Elastic

Kinetica

SAP

formerly Sybase

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2010

2012

2010

1992

2019

Current release

8.6, January 2023

7.1, August 2021

2.0 SPS07 (April 4, 2023), April 2023

17, July 2015

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate Enterprise

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++

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

Linux

Appliance or cloud-service

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

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

yes

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, int, float, geo point, date, cross reference, fuzzy references

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 data objects are indexed in a semantic vector space (the Contextionary), all primitive fields are indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
HTTP API
JDBC
ODBC

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

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

C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

SQLScript, R

yes, in C/C++, Java, .Net or Perl

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

triggers when inserted values for one or more columns fall within a specified range

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes

none

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Source-replica replication

yes

Source-replica replication

Database mirroring

yes

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 or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

Immediate Consistency

Eventual 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

In-memory capabilities

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

Memcached and Redis integration

yes

GPU vRAM or System RAM

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users and roles on table level

yes

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
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Competitive advantages

Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
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Typical application scenarios

As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
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Key customers

All companies that have data.
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Market metrics

As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
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Licensing and pricing models

Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
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