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

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

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

A distributed, linear scalable, high perfomant Graph DBMS

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

Search engine

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Graph DBMS

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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

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	2.23
Rank	#116	Overall
	#10	Graph DBMS

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	0.74
Rank	#224	Overall
	#103	Relational DBMS

Website

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

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

github.com/vesoft-inc/nebula
www.nebula-graph.io

sphinxsearch.com

sqream.com

Technical documentation

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

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

docs.nebula-graph.io

sphinxsearch.com/docs

docs.sqream.com

Developer

Microsoft

Vesoft Inc.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

SQream Technologies

Initial release

2015

2014

2019

2001

2017

Current release

3.5.1, February 2023

2022.1.6, December 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0 + Common Clause 1.0

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++, CUDA, Haskell, Java, Scala

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Strong typed schema

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

yes

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

Nebula Graph internally uses the Key-Value store RocksDB for persistency. The vertices, edges, and their properties are stored as Key while their values are stored as Value. The primary indexes are per Key and secondary indexes are per Value.

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

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

Browser interface
console (shell)
Cypher Query Language
GO Object Graph Mapper
Java Object Graph Mapper
NGBatis

ORM framework for NebulaGraph and Spring-Boot
Proprietary native API
Python Object Graph Mapper
Query language nGQL

Proprietary protocol

.Net
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

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

.Net
C++
Go
Java
PHP
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

JavaScript

user defined functions

user defined functions in Python

Triggers

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

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

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

Relationships in graphs

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

using RocksDB

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

yes

using Azure authentication

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

Role-based access control

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

NebulaGraph is a truly distributed, linearly scalable, lightning-fast graph database,...
» more

Competitive advantages

NebulaGraph boasts the world's only graph database solution that is able to host...
» more

Typical application scenarios

Social networking Fraud detection Knowledge graph Data warehouse management Anti...
» more

Key customers

Companies from a variety of industries have implemented NebulaGraph Database in production,...
» more

Market metrics

At our very early stage, NebulaGraph has already received over 10,000 stars on GitHub...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

NebulaGraph is open source and free to use under Apache 2.0 license.
» more

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.