DBMS > MariaDB vs. Sphinx vs. Tarantool vs. Virtuoso

System Properties Comparison MariaDB vs. Sphinx vs. Tarantool vs. Virtuoso

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

MySQL application compatible open source RDBMS, enhanced with high availability, security, interoperability and performance capabilities. MariaDB ColumnStore provides a column-oriented storage engine and MariaDB Xpand supports distributed SQL.

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

In-memory computing platform with a flexible data schema for efficiently building high-performance applications

Virtuoso is a multi-model hybrid-RDBMS that supports management of data represented as relational tables and/or property graphs

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Document store
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Native XML DBMS
Relational DBMS
RDF store
Search engine

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS

with OQGraph storage engine
Spatial DBMS

Spatial DBMS

with Tarantool/GIS extension

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	83.44
Rank	#15	Overall
	#10	Relational DBMS

Score	5.97
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	1.63
Rank	#139	Overall
	#25	Document stores
	#24	Key-value stores
	#65	Relational DBMS

Score	3.99
Rank	#75	Overall
	#13	Document stores
	#4	Graph DBMS
	#2	Native XML DBMS
	#40	Relational DBMS
	#2	RDF stores
	#9	Search engines

Website

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

sphinxsearch.com

www.tarantool.io

virtuoso.openlinksw.com

Technical documentation

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

sphinxsearch.com/docs

www.tarantool.io/en/doc

docs.openlinksw.com/virtuoso

Developer

MariaDB Corporation Ab (MariaDB Enterprise),
MariaDB Foundation (community MariaDB Server)

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

OpenLink Software

Initial release

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

2001

2008

1998

Current release

11.5.2, August 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

2.10.0, May 2022

7.2.11, September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription available

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

BSD-2, source-available extensions (modules), commercial licenses for Tarantool Enterprise

Open Source

GPLv2, extended commercial license available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

STACKIT MariaDB offers MariaDB in a fully managed version in enterprise grade, 100% GDPR-compliant.

Implementation language

C and C++

C++

C and C++

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

BSD
Linux
macOS

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

yes

Flexible data schema: relational definition for tables with ability to store json-like documents in columns

yes

SQL - Standard relational schema
RDF - Quad (S, P, O, G) or Triple (S, P, O)
XML - DTD, XML Schema
DAV - freeform filesystem objects, plus User Defined Types a/k/a Dynamic Extension Type

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, double, decimal, uuid, integer, blob, boolean, datetime

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

Secondary indexes

yes

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

with proprietary extensions

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

Full-featured ANSI SQL support

yes

SQL-92, SQL-200x, SQL-3, SQLX

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Proprietary protocol

Open binary protocol

ADO.NET
GeoSPARQL
HTTP API
JDBC
Jena RDF API
ODBC
OLE DB
RDF4J API
RESTful HTTP API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SOAP webservices
SPARQL 1.1
WebDAV
XPath
XQuery
XSLT

Supported programming languages

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Eiffel
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

C
C#
C++
Erlang
Go
Java
JavaScript
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Rust

.Net
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Visual Basic

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

PL/SQL compatibility added with version 10.3

Lua, C and SQL stored procedures

yes

Virtuoso PL

Triggers

yes

yes, before/after data modification events, on replication events, client session events

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

Sharding

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

Sharding, partitioned with virtual buckets by user defined affinity key. Live resharding for scale up and scale down without maintenance downtime.

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

Asynchronous replication with multi-master option
Configurable replication topology (full-mesh, chain, star)
Synchronous quorum replication (with Raft)

Chain, star, and bi-directional replication
Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Casual consistency across sharding partitions
Eventual consistency within replicaset partition

when using asyncronous replication
Immediate Consistency within single instance
Sequential consistency including linearizable read within replicaset partition

when using Raft

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID, with serializable isolation and linearizable read (within partition); Configurable MVCC (within partition); No cross-shard distributed transactions

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, cooperative multitasking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

not for in-memory storage engine

yes

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

yes, write ahead logging

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

with MEMORY storage engine

yes, full featured in-memory storage engine with persistence

yes

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access Control Lists
Mutual TLS authentication for Tarantol Enterprise
Password based authentication
Role-based access control (RBAC) and LDAP for Tarantol Enterprise
Users and Roles

Fine-grained Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) in addition to typical coarse-grained Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) according to SQL-standard. Pluggable authentication with supported standards (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos)

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

MariaDB is the most powerful open source relational database – modern SQL and JSON...
» more

Virtuoso is a modern multi-model RDBMS for managing data represented as tabular relations...
» more

Competitive advantages

MariaDB Servers have many features unavailable in other open source relational databases....
» more

Performance & Scale — as exemplified by DBpedia and the LOD Cloud it spawned, i.e.,...
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Typical application scenarios

Web, SaaS and Cloud operational applications that require high availability, scalability...
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Used for — Analytics/BI Conceptual Data Virtualization Enterprise Knowledge Graphs...
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Key customers

Deutsche Bank, DBS Bank, Nasdaq, Red Hat, ServiceNow, Verizon and Walgreens Featured...
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Broad use across enterprises and governments including — European Union (EU) US Government...
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Market metrics

MariaDB is the default database in the LAMP stack supplied by Red Hat and SUSE Linux,...
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Largest installed-base of Multi-Model RDBMS for AI-friendly Knowledge Graphs Platform...
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Licensing and pricing models

MariaDB plc subscriptions cover our free, open source database, Community Server,...
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Available in both Commercial Enterprise and Open Source (GPL v2) Editions Feature...
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