DBMS > HEAVY.AI vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx vs. XTDB

System Properties Comparison HEAVY.AI vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx vs. XTDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A high performance, column-oriented RDBMS, specifically developed to harness the massive parallelism of modern CPU and GPU hardware

Search-as-a-service for web and mobile app development

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

A general purpose database with bitemporal SQL and Datalog and graph queries

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Vector DBMS

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

Score	1.77
Rank	#141	Overall
	#65	Relational DBMS

Score	5.59
Rank	#63	Overall
	#7	Search engines

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	0.11
Rank	#343	Overall
	#46	Document stores

Website

github.com/heavyai/heavydb
www.heavy.ai

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/search

www.snowflake.com

sphinxsearch.com

github.com/xtdb/xtdb
www.xtdb.com

Technical documentation

docs.heavy.ai

learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

sphinxsearch.com/docs

www.xtdb.com/docs

Developer

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Juxt Ltd.

Initial release

2016

2015

2014

2001

2019

Current release

5.10, January 2022

3.5.1, February 2023

1.19, September 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

MIT License

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

C++ and CUDA

C++

Clojure

Server operating systems

Linux

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

All OS with a Java 8 (and higher) VM
Linux

Data scheme

yes

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

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes, extensible-data-notation format

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

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

limited SQL, making use of Apache Calcite

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

HTTP REST
JDBC

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Clojure
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

Triggers

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Round robin

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Sharding

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

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

none

yes, each node contains all data

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

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

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

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

yes, flexibel persistency by using storage technologies like Apache Kafka, RocksDB or LMDB

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes

using Azure authentication

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

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