DBMS > Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. SAP SQL Anywhere vs. Sphinx vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. SAP SQL Anywhere vs. Sphinx vs. TimescaleDB

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

RDBMS database and synchronization technologies for server, desktop, remote office, and mobile environments

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

Search engine

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

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	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	3.95
Rank	#80	Overall
	#42	Relational DBMS

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	4.46
Rank	#71	Overall
	#5	Time Series DBMS

Website

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

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

www.sap.com/products/technology-platform/sql-anywhere.html

sphinxsearch.com

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

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

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

help.sap.com/docs/SAP_SQL_Anywhere

sphinxsearch.com/docs

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Microsoft

SAP

formerly Sybase

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Timescale

Initial release

2015

2014

1992

2001

2017

Current release

17, July 2015

3.5.1, February 2023

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

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

hosted

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

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

yes

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

SQL-like query language

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

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

ADO.NET
HTTP API
JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

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

Supported programming languages

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

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

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

JavaScript

yes, in C/C++, Java, .Net or Perl

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

JavaScript

yes

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

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

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

Database mirroring

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

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.

yes

User concepts

Access control

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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