DBMS > Informix vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Sphinx vs. SQream DB

System Properties Comparison Informix vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Sphinx vs. SQream DB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A secure embeddable database from IBM, positioned besides IBM Db2 as a relatively low-cost product optimized for OLTP and Internet of Things data

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

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

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

a GPU-based, columnar RDBMS for big data analytics workloads

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Since Version 12.10 support for JSON/BSON datatypes compatible with MongoDB

Search engine

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

with Informix TimeSeries Extension

Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	17.87
Rank	#35	Overall
	#22	Relational DBMS

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	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	0.70
Rank	#227	Overall
	#104	Relational DBMS

Website

www.ibm.com/products/informix

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

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

sphinxsearch.com

sqream.com

Technical documentation

informix.hcldoc.com
www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSGU8G/welcomeIfxServers.html

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

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

sphinxsearch.com/docs

docs.sqream.com

Developer

IBM, HCL Technologies

Effective May 1st, 2017, HCL took on development, technical support, and product management teams, and works jointly with IBM on product strategy, marketing, and sales.

Microsoft

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

SQream Technologies

Initial release

1984

2015

2014

2001

2017

Current release

14.10.FC5, November 2020

3.5.1, February 2023

2022.1.6, December 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free developer edition available

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

commercial

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, C++ and Java

C++

C++, CUDA, Haskell, Java, Scala

Server operating systems

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Since Version 12.10 support for JSON/BSON datatypes

yes

JSON types

yes, ANSI Standard SQL Types

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 properties auto-indexed by default

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
JSON API

MongoDB compatible
MQTT (Message Queue Telemetry Transport)
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP API

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

Proprietary protocol

.Net
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

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

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

JavaScript

user defined functions in Python

Triggers

yes

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

Sharding

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

horizontal and vertical partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

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

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

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

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

User concepts

Access control

Users with fine-grained authentication, authorization, and auditing controls

yes

using Azure authentication

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

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