DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Oracle vs. SAP SQL Anywhere vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Oracle vs. SAP SQL Anywhere vs. Sphinx

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

Widely used RDBMS

RDBMS database and synchronization technologies for server, desktop, remote office, and mobile environments

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Primary database model

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
RDF store

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
Spatial DBMS

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
Vector DBMS

since Oracle 23

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

Score	135.35
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	1236.29
Rank	#1	Overall
	#1	Relational DBMS

Score	4.25
Rank	#79	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

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

www.oracle.com/database

www.sap.com/products/technology-platform/sql-anywhere.html

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

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

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

docs.oracle.com/en/database

help.sap.com/docs/SAP_SQL_Anywhere

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Elastic

Microsoft

Oracle

SAP

formerly Sybase

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2010

1989

1980

1992

2001

Current release

8.6, January 2023

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

23c, September 2023

17, July 2015

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

restricted free version is available

commercial

restricted free version is available

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

Java

C++

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows
z/OS

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

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

yes

Schemaless in JSON and XML columns

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

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

JDBC
ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

ADO.NET
HTTP API
JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

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

C
C#
C++
Clojure
Cobol
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Fortran
Groovy
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Objective C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Tcl
Visual Basic

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

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

PL/SQL

also stored procedures in Java possible

yes, in C/C++, Java, .Net or Perl

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

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

none

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication

Database mirroring

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

can be realized in PL/SQL

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

isolation level can be parameterized

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

Memcached and Redis integration

yes

Version 12c introduced the new option 'Oracle Database In-Memory'

yes

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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