DBMS > HBase vs. Snowflake vs. Spark SQL vs. STSdb vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison HBase vs. Snowflake vs. Spark SQL vs. STSdb vs. Weaviate

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on Apache Hadoop and on concepts of BigTable

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

Spark SQL is a component on top of 'Spark Core' for structured data processing

Key-Value Store with special method for indexing

optimized for high performance using a special indexing method

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

Primary database model

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

Score	30.50
Rank	#26	Overall
	#2	Wide column stores

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	18.96
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Score	0.04
Rank	#360	Overall
	#52	Key-value stores

Score	1.73
Rank	#143	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Website

hbase.apache.org

www.snowflake.com

spark.apache.org/sql

github.com/STSSoft/STSdb4

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

hbase.apache.org/book.html

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

spark.apache.org/docs/latest/sql-programming-guide.html

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Powerset

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Apache Software Foundation

STS Soft SC

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2008

2014

2011

2019

Current release

2.3.4, January 2021

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

4.0.8, September 2015

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

GPLv2, commercial license available

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate Enterprise

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

Scala

Server operating systems

Linux
Unix
Windows

using Cygwin

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

Windows

Data scheme

schema-free, schema definition possible

yes

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

yes

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

options to bring your own types, AVRO

yes

primitive types and user defined types (classes)

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP API
Thrift

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
ODBC

.NET Client API

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Groovy
Java
PHP
Python
Scala

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Java
Python
R
Scala

C#
Java

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Coprocessors in Java

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes

yes, utilizing Spark Core

none

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

none

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

Single row ACID (across millions of columns)

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.

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access Control Lists (ACL) for RBAC, integration with Apache Ranger for RBAC & ABAC

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

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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