DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. RavenDB vs. TiDB vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. RavenDB vs. TiDB vs. Weaviate

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

Open Source Operational and Transactional Enterprise NoSQL Document Database

TiDB is an open source distributed SQL database that supports Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) workloads. It is MySQL compatible and features horizontal scalability, strong consistency, and high availability.

An AI-native realtime vector database engine that integrates scalable machine learning models.

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

Document store

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	2.84
Rank	#101	Overall
	#18	Document stores

Score	4.25
Rank	#74	Overall
	#40	Relational DBMS

Score	1.52
Rank	#153	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

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

ravendb.net

pingcap.com

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

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

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

ravendb.net/docs

docs.pingcap.com/tidb/stable

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

Elastic

Microsoft

Hibernating Rhinos

PingCAP, Inc.

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2010

1989

2010

2016

2019

Current release

8.6, January 2023

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

5.4, July 2022

8.1.0, May 2024

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

AGPL version 3, commercial license available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate Enterprise

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.

SQLServer Flex @ STACKIT offers a managed version of SQL Server with adjustable CPU, RAM, storage amount and speed, in enterprise grade to perfectly match all application requirements. All services are 100% GDPR-compliant.

TiDB Cloud: Fully-managed TiDB Service. Bring everything great about TiDB to the cloud.

Implementation language

Java

C++

Go, Rust

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
Windows

Linux
macOS
Raspberry Pi
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

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

yes

schema-free

yes

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, int, float, geo point, date, cross reference, fuzzy references

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

all data objects are indexed in a semantic vector space (the Contextionary), all primitive fields are indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

SQL-like query language (RQL)

yes

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

.NET Client API
F# Client API
Go Client API
Java Client API
NodeJS Client API
PHP Client API
Python Client API
RESTful HTTP API

GORM
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
SQLAlchemy

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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
C#
F#
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

JavaScript / TypeScript
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

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

Sharding

horizontal partitioning (by key range)

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Multi-source replication

Using Raft consensus algorithm to ensure data replication with strong consistency among multiple replicas.

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

yes

with TiSpark 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

Default ACID transactions on the local node (eventually consistent across the cluster). Atomic operations with cluster-wide ACID transactions. Eventual consistency for indexes and full-text search indexes.

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

full support since version 6.6

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

ACID, Cluster-wide transaction available

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

Authorization levels configured per client per database

Fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

TiDB is an advanced open-source, distributed SQL database for modern application...
» more

Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
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Competitive advantages

- HORIZONTAL SCALING : TiDB grants total transparency into your data workloads without...
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Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
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Typical application scenarios

TiDB is ideal for transactional applications that require extreme scalability and...
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As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
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Key customers

Block, Pinterest, Catalyst, Bolt, Flipkart, Capcom, Shopee (E-commerce), JD Cloud...
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All companies that have data.
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Market metrics

34K+ GitHub stars 5K+ members in TiDB Community Slack 1K+ community contributors...
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As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
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Licensing and pricing models

TiDB Community : Free open source software (Apache 2.0) TiDB Self-Hosted : Enterprise...
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Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
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