DBMS > Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Realm vs. RocksDB vs. VoltDB vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Realm vs. RocksDB vs. VoltDB vs. Weaviate

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

A DBMS built for use on mobile devices that’s a fast, easy to use alternative to SQLite and Core Data

Embeddable persistent key-value store optimized for fast storage (flash and RAM)

Distributed In-Memory NewSQL RDBMS

Used for OLTP applications with a high frequency of relatively simple transactions, that can hold all their data in memory

An AI-native realtime vector database engine that integrates scalable machine learning models.

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

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

Score	5.59
Rank	#63	Overall
	#7	Search engines

Score	7.60
Rank	#52	Overall
	#9	Document stores

Score	3.65
Rank	#85	Overall
	#11	Key-value stores

Score	1.44
Rank	#158	Overall
	#73	Relational DBMS

Score	1.73
Rank	#143	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Website

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

realm.io

rocksdb.org

www.voltdb.com

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

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

realm.io/docs

github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki

docs.voltdb.com

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

Microsoft

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

Facebook, Inc.

VoltDB Inc.

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2015

2014

2013

2010

2019

Current release

8.11.4, April 2024

11.3, April 2022

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

BSD

Open Source

AGPL for Community Edition, commercial license for Enterprise, AWS, and Pro Editions

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate Enterprise

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++

Java, C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Android
Backend: server-less
iOS
Windows

Linux

Linux
OS X

for development

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, int, float, geo point, date, cross reference, fuzzy references

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 data objects are indexed in a semantic vector space (the Contextionary), all primitive fields are indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

only a subset of SQL 99

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

C++ API
Java API

Java API
JDBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

.Net
Java

with Android only
Objective-C
React Native
Swift

C
C++
Go
Java
Perl
Python
Ruby

C#
C++
Erlang

not officially supported
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

runs within the applications so server-side scripts are unnecessary

Java

Triggers

yes

Change Listeners

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

horizontal partitioning

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

FOREIGN KEY constraints are not supported

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

ACID

yes

ACID

Transactions are executed single-threaded within stored procedures

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Data access is serialized by the server

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Snapshots and command logging

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

In-Memory realm

yes

User concepts

Access control

yes

using Azure authentication

yes

Users and roles with access to stored procedures

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
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Competitive advantages

Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
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Typical application scenarios

As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
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Key customers

All companies that have data.
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Market metrics

As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
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Licensing and pricing models

Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
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