DBMS > Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Solr vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Solr vs. Sphinx

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

A widely used distributed, scalable search engine based on Apache Lucene

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

Primary database model

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	29.04
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	42.91
Rank	#24	Overall
	#3	Search engines

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

solr.apache.org

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

solr.apache.org/resources.html

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Microsoft

Apache Software Foundation

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2014

1989

2006

2001

Current release

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

9.6.0, April 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache Version 2

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++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

runs as a servlet in servlet container (e.g. Tomcat, Jetty is included)

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Dynamic Fields enables on-the-fly addition of new fields

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

yes

supports customizable data types and automatic typing

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

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

Solr Parallel SQL Interface

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

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

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

.Net
Erlang
Java
JavaScript
any language that supports sockets and either XML or JSON
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

JavaScript

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

Java plugins

Triggers

JavaScript

yes

User configurable commands triggered on index changes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

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, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

yes

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

spark-solr: github.com/lucidworks/spark-solr and streaming expressions to reduce

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Eventual 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

optimistic locking

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

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes

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