DBMS > MaxDB vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Sphinx vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison MaxDB vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Sphinx vs. TimescaleDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A robust and reliable RDBMS optimized to run all major SAP solutions

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 time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Search engine

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	2.26
Rank	#114	Overall
	#55	Relational DBMS

Score	5.52
Rank	#59	Overall
	#6	Search engines

Score	27.71
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	4.46
Rank	#71	Overall
	#5	Time Series DBMS

Website

maxdb.sap.com

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

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

sphinxsearch.com

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

maxdb.sap.com/documentation

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

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

sphinxsearch.com/docs

docs.timescale.com

Developer

SAP, acquired from Software AG (Adabas-D) in 1997

Microsoft

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Timescale

Initial release

1984

2015

2014

2001

2017

Current release

7.9.10.12, February 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Limited community edition free

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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++

Server operating systems

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Windows

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data 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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
WebDAV

RESTful HTTP API

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

Proprietary protocol

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

.Net
C#
Java
Perl
PHP
Python

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

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

JavaScript

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

JavaScript

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

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

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

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.

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes

using Azure authentication

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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