DBMS > Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. Sphinx

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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

Widely used in-process key-value store

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

Primary database model

Search engine

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Key-value store

supports sorted and unsorted key sets
Native XML DBMS

in the Oracle Berkeley DB XML version

Search engine

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	5.71
Rank	#64	Overall
	#8	Search engines

Score	29.85
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	2.52
Rank	#114	Overall
	#20	Key-value stores
	#3	Native XML DBMS

Score	6.03
Rank	#60	Overall
	#6	Search engines

Website

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

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

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

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

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

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

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

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Microsoft

Oracle

originally developed by Sleepycat, which was acquired by Oracle

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2015

2014

1994

2001

Current release

18.1.40, May 2020

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

commercial license available

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

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Implementation language

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

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

AIX
Android
FreeBSD
iOS
Linux
OS X
Solaris
VxWorks
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON 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

only with the Berkeley DB XML edition

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 interfaced based on SQLite is available

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

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

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

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

.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

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

JavaScript

Triggers

JavaScript

yes

only for the SQL API

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

Sharding

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Source-replica replication

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

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 Azure authentication

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

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