DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. VoltDB vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. VoltDB vs. Weaviate

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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

Distributed In-Memory NewSQL RDBMS

Used for OLTP applications with a high frequency of relatively simple transactions, that can hold all their data in memory

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

Primary database model

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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	1.44
Rank	#158	Overall
	#73	Relational DBMS

Score	1.73
Rank	#143	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

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

www.voltdb.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

docs.voltdb.com

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

Elastic

Microsoft

VoltDB Inc.

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2010

1989

2010

2019

Current release

8.6, January 2023

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

11.3, April 2022

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

AGPL for Community Edition, commercial license for Enterprise, AWS, and Pro Editions

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.

Implementation language

Java

C++

Java, C++

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
Windows

Linux
OS X

for development

Data scheme

schema-free

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

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

only a subset of SQL 99

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)

Java API
JDBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

C#
C++
Erlang

not officially supported
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

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

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

Sharding

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

yes

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

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

FOREIGN KEY constraints are not supported

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Transactions are executed single-threaded within stored procedures

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Data access is serialized by the server

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Snapshots and command logging

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 and roles with access to stored procedures

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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

Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
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Typical application scenarios

As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
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Key customers

All companies that have data.
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Market metrics

As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
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Licensing and pricing models

Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
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