DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. Microsoft SQL Server

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. Microsoft SQL Server

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Our visitors often compare Elasticsearch and Microsoft SQL Server with PostgreSQL, MongoDB and Redis.

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

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Primary database model

Search engine
Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	123.81
Rank	#9	Overall
	#1	Search engines
	#1	Vector DBMS

Score	774.89
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

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

Technical documentation

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

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

Developer

Elastic

Microsoft

Initial release

2010

1989

Current release

8.6, January 2023

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

restricted free version is available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Implementation language

Java

C++

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
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

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

Supported programming languages

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

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

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

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

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

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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More resources

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Recent citations in the news

GitHub releases Vulcanizer, a new Golang Library for operating Elasticsearch
17 May 2025, Packt

OpenSearch in 2025: Much more than an Elasticsearch fork
28 April 2025, InfoWorld

Amazon OpenSearch Service announces Standard and Extended Support dates for Elasticsearch and OpenSearch versions
7 November 2024, Amazon Web Services

Elasticsearch will be open source again as CTO declares changed landscape
2 September 2024, devclass

Elasticsearch Now Available as a Native Grounding Engine on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Platform
9 April 2025, Business Wire

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