DBMS > Microsoft SQL Server vs. Postgres-XL vs. SpaceTime vs. Sphinx vs. Virtuoso

System Properties Comparison Microsoft SQL Server vs. Postgres-XL vs. SpaceTime vs. Sphinx vs. Virtuoso

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Based on PostgreSQL enhanced with MPP and write-scale-out cluster features

SpaceTime is a spatio-temporal DBMS with a focus on performance.

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

Virtuoso is a multi-model hybrid-RDBMS that supports management of data represented as relational tables and/or property graphs

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Spatial DBMS

Search engine

Document store
Graph DBMS
Native XML DBMS
Relational DBMS
RDF store
Search engine

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	0.49
Rank	#256	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#7	Spatial DBMS

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	4.26
Rank	#78	Overall
	#13	Document stores
	#4	Graph DBMS
	#2	Native XML DBMS
	#42	Relational DBMS
	#2	RDF stores
	#9	Search engines

Website

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

www.postgres-xl.org

www.mireo.com/spacetime

sphinxsearch.com

virtuoso.openlinksw.com

Technical documentation

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

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

sphinxsearch.com/docs

docs.openlinksw.com/virtuoso

Developer

Microsoft

Mireo

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

OpenLink Software

Initial release

1989

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

2020

2001

1998

Current release

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

10 R1, October 2018

3.5.1, February 2023

7.2.11, September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Mozilla public license

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

GPLv2, extended commercial license available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
Windows

Linux
macOS

Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

SQL - Standard relational schema
RDF - Quad (S, P, O, G) or Triple (S, P, O)
XML - DTD, XML Schema
DAV - freeform filesystem objects, plus User Defined Types a/k/a Dynamic Extension Type

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

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

XML type, but no XML query functionality

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

A subset of ANSI SQL is implemented

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

SQL-92, SQL-200x, SQL-3, SQLX

APIs and other access methods

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

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

RESTful HTTP API

Proprietary protocol

ADO.NET
GeoSPARQL
HTTP API
JDBC
Jena RDF API
ODBC
OLE DB
RDF4J API
RESTful HTTP API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SOAP webservices
SPARQL 1.1
WebDAV
XPath
XQuery
XSLT

Supported programming languages

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

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Erlang
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

C#
C++
Python

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

.Net
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Visual Basic

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

user defined functions

yes

Virtuoso PL

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

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

horizontal partitioning

Fixed-grid hypercubes

Sharding

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

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Real-time block device replication (DRBD)

none

Chain, star, and bi-directional replication
Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

MVCC

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes

Fine-grained Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) in addition to typical coarse-grained Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) according to SQL-standard. Pluggable authentication with supported standards (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos)

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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Competitive advantages

Performance & Scale — as exemplified by DBpedia and the LOD Cloud it spawned, i.e.,...
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Typical application scenarios

Used for — Analytics/BI Conceptual Data Virtualization Enterprise Knowledge Graphs...
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Key customers

Broad use across enterprises and governments including — European Union (EU) US Government...
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Market metrics

Largest installed-base of Multi-Model RDBMS for AI-friendly Knowledge Graphs Platform...
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Licensing and pricing models

Available in both Commercial Enterprise and Open Source (GPL v2) Editions Feature...
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