DBMS > Hazelcast vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. mSQL vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Hazelcast vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. mSQL vs. Sphinx

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A widely adopted in-memory data grid

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

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

mSQL (Mini SQL) is a simple and lightweight RDBMS

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

Primary database model

Key-value store

Search engine

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Secondary database models

Document store

JSON support with IMDG 3.12

Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	5.97
Rank	#57	Overall
	#6	Key-value stores

Score	5.59
Rank	#63	Overall
	#7	Search engines

Score	29.04
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	1.27
Rank	#167	Overall
	#77	Relational DBMS

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

hazelcast.com

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

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

hughestech.com.au/products/msql

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

hazelcast.org/imdg/docs

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

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Hazelcast

Microsoft

Hughes Technologies

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2008

2015

2014

1994

2001

Current release

5.3.6, November 2023

4.4, October 2021

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2; commercial licenses available

commercial

free licenses can be provided

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

hosted

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

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

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

the object must implement a serialization strategy

Secondary indexes

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

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

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

JCache
JPA
Memcached protocol
RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP API

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

.Net
C#
C++
Clojure
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Scala

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

C
C++
Delphi
Java
Perl
PHP
Tcl

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Event Listeners, Executor Services

JavaScript

Triggers

yes

Events

JavaScript

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

Sharding

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Replicated Map

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency selectable by user

Raft Consensus Algorithm

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

none

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

Transaction concepts

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

one or two-phase-commit; repeatable reads; read commited

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

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.

yes

User concepts

Access control

Role-based access control

yes

using Azure authentication

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

More information provided by the system vendor

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.