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DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. MarkLogic vs. Sphinx vs. Virtuoso

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. MarkLogic vs. Sphinx vs. Virtuoso

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines
NameElasticsearch  Xexclude from comparisonMarkLogic  Xexclude from comparisonSphinx  Xexclude from comparisonVirtuoso  Xexclude from comparison
DescriptionA distributed, RESTful modern search and analytics engine based on Apache Lucene infoElasticsearch lets you perform and combine many types of searches such as structured, unstructured, geo, and metricOperational and transactional Enterprise NoSQL databaseOpen source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databasesVirtuoso is a multi-model hybrid-RDBMS that supports management of data represented as relational tables and/or property graphs
Primary database modelSearch engineDocument store
Native XML DBMS
RDF store infoas of version 7
Search engine
Search engineDocument store
Graph DBMS
Native XML DBMS
Relational DBMS
RDF store
Search engine
Secondary database modelsDocument store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS
Spatial DBMS
DB-Engines Ranking infomeasures the popularity of database management systemsranking trend
Trend Chart
Score134.78
Rank#7  Overall
#1  Search engines
Score6.50
Rank#56  Overall
#10  Document stores
#1  Native XML DBMS
#1  RDF stores
#5  Search engines
Score6.03
Rank#60  Overall
#6  Search engines
Score4.20
Rank#83  Overall
#14  Document stores
#4  Graph DBMS
#2  Native XML DBMS
#45  Relational DBMS
#2  RDF stores
#9  Search engines
Websitewww.elastic.co/­elasticsearchwww.marklogic.comsphinxsearch.comvirtuoso.openlinksw.com
Technical documentationwww.elastic.co/­guide/­en/­elasticsearch/­reference/­current/­index.htmldocs.marklogic.comsphinxsearch.com/­docsdocs.openlinksw.com/­virtuoso
DeveloperElasticMarkLogic Corp.Sphinx Technologies Inc.OpenLink Software
Initial release2010200120011998
Current release8.6, January 202311.0, December 20223.5.1, February 20237.2.11, September 2023
License infoCommercial or Open SourceOpen Source infoElastic Licensecommercial inforestricted free version is availableOpen Source infoGPL version 2, commercial licence availableOpen Source infoGPLv2, extended commercial license available
Cloud-based only infoOnly available as a cloud servicenononono
DBaaS offerings (sponsored links) infoDatabase as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.
Implementation languageJavaC++C++C
Server operating systemsAll OS with a Java VMLinux
OS X
Windows
FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows
AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows
Data schemeschema-free infoFlexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistentschema-free infoSchema can be enforcedyesyes infoSQL - Standard relational schema
RDF - Quad (S, P, O, G) or Triple (S, P, O)
XML - DTD, XML Schema
DAV - freeform filesystem objects, plus User Defined Types a/k/a Dynamic Extension Type
Typing infopredefined data types such as float or dateyesyesnoyes
XML support infoSome form of processing data in XML format, e.g. support for XML data structures, and/or support for XPath, XQuery or XSLT.noyesyes
Secondary indexesyes infoAll search fields are automatically indexedyesyes infofull-text index on all search fieldsyes
SQL infoSupport of SQLSQL-like query languageyes infoSQL92SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)yes infoSQL-92, SQL-200x, SQL-3, SQLX
APIs and other access methodsJava API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API
Java API
Node.js Client API
ODBC
proprietary Optic API infoProprietary Query API, introduced with version 9
RESTful HTTP API
SPARQL
WebDAV
XDBC
XQuery
XSLT
Proprietary protocolADO.NET
GeoSPARQL
HTTP API
JDBC
Jena RDF API
ODBC
OLE DB
RDF4J API
RESTful HTTP API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SOAP webservices
SPARQL 1.1
WebDAV
XPath
XQuery
XSLT
Supported programming languages.Net
Groovy
Community Contributed Clients
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
C++ infounofficial client library
Java
Perl infounofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby infounofficial client library
.Net
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Visual Basic
Server-side scripts infoStored proceduresyesyes infovia XQuery or JavaScriptnoyes infoVirtuoso PL
Triggersyes infoby using the 'percolation' featureyesnoyes
Partitioning methods infoMethods for storing different data on different nodesShardingShardingSharding infoPartitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supportedyes
Replication methods infoMethods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodesyesyesnoneChain, star, and bi-directional replication
Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication
MapReduce infoOffers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methodsES-Hadoop Connectoryes infovia Hadoop Connector, HDFS Direct Access and in-database MapReduce jobsnoyes
Consistency concepts infoMethods to ensure consistency in a distributed systemEventual Consistency infoSynchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, allImmediate ConsistencyImmediate Consistency
Foreign keys infoReferential integritynononoyes
Transaction concepts infoSupport to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of datanoACID infocan act as a resource manager in an XA/JTA transactionnoACID
Concurrency infoSupport for concurrent manipulation of datayesyesyesyes
Durability infoSupport for making data persistentyesyesyes infoThe original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.yes
In-memory capabilities infoIs there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.Memcached and Redis integrationyes, with Range Indexesyes
User concepts infoAccess controlRole-based access control at the document and subdocument levelsnoFine-grained Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) in addition to typical coarse-grained Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) according to SQL-standard. Pluggable authentication with supported standards (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos)
More information provided by the system vendor
ElasticsearchMarkLogicSphinxVirtuoso
Specific characteristicsVirtuoso is a modern multi-model RDBMS for managing data represented as tabular relations...
» more
Competitive advantagesPerformance & Scale — as exemplified by DBpedia and the LOD Cloud it spawned, i.e.,...
» more
Typical application scenariosUsed for — Analytics/BI Conceptual Data Virtualization Enterprise Knowledge Graphs...
» more
Key customersBroad use across enterprises and governments including — European Union (EU) US Government...
» more
Market metricsLargest installed-base ​of Multi-Model RDBMS for AI-friendly Knowledge Graphs Platform...
» more
Licensing and pricing modelsAvailable in both Commercial Enterprise and Open Source (GPL v2) Editions Feature...
» more

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