DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. Realm vs. Sphinx vs. SQLite

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. Realm vs. Sphinx vs. SQLite

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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

A DBMS built for use on mobile devices that’s a fast, easy to use alternative to SQLite and Core Data

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

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

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

Score	134.78
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	7.71
Rank	#52	Overall
	#9	Document stores

Score	6.03
Rank	#60	Overall
	#6	Search engines

Score	116.01
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

realm.io

sphinxsearch.com

www.sqlite.org

Technical documentation

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

realm.io/docs

sphinxsearch.com/docs

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

Developer

Elastic

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Initial release

2010

2014

2001

2000

Current release

8.6, January 2023

3.5.1, February 2023

3.45.2 (12 March 2024), March 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

Public Domain

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++

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

Android
Backend: server-less
iOS
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

server-less

Data scheme

schema-free

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

yes

dynamic column types

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Proprietary protocol

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

Supported programming languages

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

.Net
Java

with Android only
Objective-C
React Native
Swift

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

runs within the applications so server-side scripts are unnecessary

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

Change Listeners

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

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

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

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

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

via file-system locks

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

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

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

In-Memory realm

yes

User concepts

Access control

yes

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