DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

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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

Search-as-a-service for web and mobile app development

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Primary database model

Search engine
Vector DBMS

Search engine

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	132.32
Rank	#8	Overall
	#1	Search engines
	#1	Vector DBMS

Score	5.49
Rank	#59	Overall
	#7	Search engines

Score	23.06
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/search

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

Technical documentation

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

learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

Developer

Elastic

Microsoft

Initial release

2010

2015

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

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

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

RESTful HTTP API

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

Supported programming languages

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

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

JavaScript

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

JavaScript

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

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

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

Transaction concepts

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

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

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

User concepts

Access control

yes

using Azure authentication

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

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