DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Spark SQL vs. Transbase

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Spark SQL vs. Transbase

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

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Spark SQL is a component on top of 'Spark Core' for structured data processing

A resource-optimized, high-performance, universally applicable RDBMS

Primary database model

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Vector DBMS

Document store
Graph 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	5.52
Rank	#59	Overall
	#6	Search engines

Score	821.56
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	18.04
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Score	0.17
Rank	#334	Overall
	#148	Relational DBMS

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

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

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

spark.apache.org/sql

www.transaction.de/en/products/transbase.html

Technical documentation

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

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

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

spark.apache.org/docs/latest/sql-programming-guide.html

www.transaction.de/en/products/transbase/features.html

Developer

Elastic

Microsoft

Apache Software Foundation

Transaction Software GmbH

Initial release

2010

2015

1989

2014

1987

Current release

8.6, January 2023

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

Transbase 8.3, 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

free development license

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

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Implementation language

Java

C++

Scala

C and C++

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Linux
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

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

yes

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

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

RESTful HTTP API

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

JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Supported programming languages

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

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

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

Java
Python
R
Scala

C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript
Kotlin
Objective-C
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

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

yes

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

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

yes, utilizing Spark Core

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

none

Source-replica replication

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

yes

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

User concepts

Access control

yes

using Azure authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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