DBMS > Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Snowflake 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

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

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

Relational DBMS

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	123.20
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational 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.snowflake.com

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

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

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2015

2014

2001

Current release

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

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++

Server operating systems

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

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

RESTful HTTP API

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

JavaScript

user defined functions

Triggers

JavaScript

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

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

yes

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.

User concepts

Access control

yes

using Azure authentication

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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