DBMS > Memcached vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Percona Server for MySQL vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Memcached vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Percona Server for MySQL vs. Sphinx

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

In-memory key-value store, originally intended for caching

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

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Enhanced drop-in replacement for MySQL based on XtraDB or TokuDB storage engines with improved performance and additional diagnostic and management features.

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

Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	19.42
Rank	#32	Overall
	#4	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	2.03
Rank	#122	Overall
	#57	Relational DBMS

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

www.memcached.org

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

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

www.percona.com/software/mysql-database/percona-server

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

github.com/memcached/memcached/wiki

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

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

www.percona.com/downloads/Percona-Server-LATEST

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Danga Interactive

originally developed by Brad Fitzpatrick for LiveJournal

Microsoft

Percona

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2003

2015

2014

2008

2001

Current release

1.6.25, March 2024

8.0.36-28, 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

BSD license

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2

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

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

hosted

Linux

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

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

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

RESTful HTTP API

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
ColdFusion
Erlang
Java
Lisp
Lua
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

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

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

JavaScript

yes

Triggers

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

Repcached, a Memcached patch, provides this functionallity

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication
XtraDB Cluster

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

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.

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

User concepts

Access control

yes

using SASL (Simple Authentication and Security Layer) protocol

yes

using Azure authentication

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

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