DBMS > Lovefield vs. mSQL vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Lovefield vs. mSQL vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Embeddable relational database for web apps written in pure JavaScript

mSQL (Mini SQL) is a simple and lightweight RDBMS

Widely used in-process key-value store

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

supports sorted and unsorted key sets
Native XML DBMS

in the Oracle Berkeley DB XML version

Relational DBMS

Search engine

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

Score	0.33
Rank	#286	Overall
	#131	Relational DBMS

Score	1.27
Rank	#169	Overall
	#76	Relational DBMS

Score	2.01
Rank	#126	Overall
	#21	Key-value stores
	#3	Native XML DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

google.github.io/lovefield

hughestech.com.au/products/msql

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/berkeleydb.html

www.snowflake.com

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

github.com/google/lovefield/blob/master/docs/spec_index.md

docs.oracle.com/cd/E17076_05/html/index.html

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Google

Hughes Technologies

Oracle

originally developed by Sleepycat, which was acquired by Oracle

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2014

1994

2014

2001

Current release

2.1.12, February 2017

4.4, October 2021

18.1.40, May 2020

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

free licenses can be provided

Open Source

commercial license available

commercial

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

JavaScript

C, Java, C++ (depending on the Berkeley DB edition)

C++

Server operating systems

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

tested with Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari

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

AIX
Android
FreeBSD
iOS
Linux
OS X
Solaris
VxWorks
Windows

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

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

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

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

only with the Berkeley DB XML edition

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

via JavaScript builder pattern

A subset of ANSI SQL is implemented

no subqueries, aggregate functions, views, foreign keys, triggers

yes

SQL interfaced based on SQLite is available

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

JavaScript

C
C++
Delphi
Java
Perl
PHP
Tcl

.Net

Figaro is a .Net framework assembly that extends Berkeley DB XML into an embeddable database engine for .NET
others

Third-party libraries to manipulate Berkeley DB files are available for many languages
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party binding
Perl
Python
Tcl

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

Triggers

Using read-only observers

yes

only for the SQL API

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

yes

Sharding

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

Source-replica replication

yes

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

none

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, by using IndexedDB or the cloud service Firebase Realtime Database

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

using MemoryDB

yes

User concepts

Access control

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

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