DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Neo4j vs. PouchDB vs. Rockset

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Neo4j vs. PouchDB vs. Rockset

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

Scalable, ACID-compliant graph database designed with a high-performance distributed cluster architecture, available in self-hosted and cloud offerings

JavaScript DBMS with an API inspired by CouchDB

A scalable, reliable search and analytics service in the cloud, built on RocksDB

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS
Search engine

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

Score	132.83
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	821.56
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	2.34
Rank	#112	Overall
	#21	Document stores

Score	0.82
Rank	#212	Overall
	#36	Document stores

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

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

neo4j.com

pouchdb.com

rockset.com

Technical documentation

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

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

neo4j.com/docs

pouchdb.com/guides

docs.rockset.com

Developer

Elastic

Microsoft

Neo4j, Inc.

Apache Software Foundation

Rockset

Initial release

2010

1989

2007

2012

2019

Current release

8.6, January 2023

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

5.20, May 2024

7.1.1, June 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Neo4j Aura: Neo4j’s fully managed cloud service: The zero-admin, always-on graph database for cloud developers.

Implementation language

Java

C++

Java, Scala

JavaScript

C++

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
Windows

Linux

Can also be used server-less as embedded Java database.
OS X
Solaris
Windows

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

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

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

dynamic typing

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

ingestion from XML files supported

Secondary indexes

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

via views

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

Read-only SQL queries, including JOINs

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

HTTP REST

only for PouchDB Server
JavaScript API

HTTP REST

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

.Net
Clojure
Elixir
Go
Groovy
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

JavaScript

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

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

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

View functions in JavaScript

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

via event handler

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

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

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Sharding

with a proxy-based framework, named couchdb-lounge

Automatic sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

Multi-source replication

also with CouchDB databases
Source-replica replication

also with CouchDB databases

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

yes

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

Causal and Eventual Consistency configurable in Causal Cluster setup
Immediate Consistency in stand-alone mode

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

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

by using IndexedDB, WebSQL or LevelDB as backend

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

Users, roles and permissions. Pluggable authentication with supported standards (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos)

Access rights for users and organizations can be defined via Rockset console

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Licensing and pricing models

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