DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. mSQL vs. Postgres-XL vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. mSQL vs. Postgres-XL vs. Snowflake 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

mSQL (Mini SQL) is a simple and lightweight RDBMS

Based on PostgreSQL enhanced with MPP and write-scale-out cluster features

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

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
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	132.83
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	1.27
Rank	#169	Overall
	#76	Relational DBMS

Score	0.53
Rank	#254	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

hughestech.com.au/products/msql

www.postgres-xl.org

www.snowflake.com

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

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

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Elastic

Hughes Technologies

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2010

1994

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

2014

2001

Current release

8.6, January 2023

4.4, October 2021

10 R1, October 2018

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

free licenses can be provided

Open Source

Mozilla public license

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

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

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris SPARC/x86
Windows

Linux
macOS

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

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

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

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

XML type, but no XML query functionality

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

A subset of ANSI SQL is implemented

no subqueries, aggregate functions, views, foreign keys, triggers

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

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

C
C++
Delphi
Java
Perl
PHP
Tcl

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Erlang
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

horizontal partitioning

yes

Sharding

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

none

yes

none

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

none

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

MVCC

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

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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