DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. Sphinx vs. SQLite vs. Vertica

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

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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

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

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

Cloud or off-cloud analytical database and query engine for structured and semi-structured streaming and batch data. Machine learning platform with built-in algorithms, data preparation capabilities, and model evaluation and management via SQL or Python.

Primary database model

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Column oriented

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

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

Score	135.35
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	114.32
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Score	10.68
Rank	#43	Overall
	#27	Relational DBMS

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

sphinxsearch.com

www.sqlite.org

www.vertica.com

Technical documentation

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

sphinxsearch.com/docs

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

vertica.com/documentation

Developer

Elastic

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Dwayne Richard Hipp

OpenText

previously Micro Focus and Hewlett Packard

Initial release

2010

2001

2000

2005

Current release

8.6, January 2023

3.5.1, February 2023

3.45.3 (15 April 2024), April 2024

12.0.3, January 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

Public Domain

commercial

Limited community edition free

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

on-premises, all major clouds - Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and containers

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

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

server-less

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

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

yes

dynamic column types

Yes, but also semi-structure/unstructured data storage, and complex hierarchical data (like Parquet) stored and/or queried.

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

full-text index on all search fields

yes

No Indexes Required. Different internal optimization strategy, but same functionality included.

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

Full 1999 standard plus machine learning, time series and geospatial. Over 650 functions.

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Proprietary protocol

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

ADO.NET
JDBC
Kafka Connector
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API
Spark Connector
vSQL

character-based, interactive, front-end utility

Supported programming languages

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

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

C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
R

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

yes, PostgreSQL PL/pgSQL, with minor differences

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

yes, called Custom Alerts

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

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

none

horizontal partitioning, hierarchical partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

none

Multi-source replication

One, or more copies of data replicated across nodes, or object-store used for repository.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

Bi-directional Spark integration

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

yes

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

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard; supports Kerberos, LDAP, Ident and hash

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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Competitive advantages

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Typical application scenarios

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Key customers

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Licensing and pricing models

Cost-based models and subscription-based models are both available. One license is...
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