DBMS > MySQL vs. Sphinx vs. Stardog vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison MySQL vs. Sphinx vs. Stardog vs. Weaviate

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Widely used open source RDBMS

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

Enterprise Knowledge Graph platform and graph DBMS with high availability, high performance reasoning, and virtualization

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Search engine

Graph DBMS
RDF store

Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	1029.49
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	5.97
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	1.93
Rank	#121	Overall
	#10	Graph DBMS
	#6	RDF stores

Score	1.48
Rank	#149	Overall
	#8	Vector DBMS

Website

www.mysql.com

sphinxsearch.com

www.stardog.com

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

dev.mysql.com/doc

sphinxsearch.com/docs

docs.stardog.com

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Stardog-Union

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

1995

2001

2010

2019

Current release

9.0.0, July 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

7.3.0, May 2020

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

commercial

60-day fully-featured trial license; 1-year fully-featured non-commercial use license for academics/students

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate Enterprise

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Implementation language

C and C++

C++

Java

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support

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.

yes

Import/export of XML data possible

Secondary indexes

yes

full-text index on all search fields

yes

supports real-time indexing in full-text and geospatial

yes

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

with proprietary extensions

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

Yes, compatible with all major SQL variants through dedicated BI/SQL Server

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Proprietary protocol

GraphQL query language
HTTP API
Jena RDF API
OWL
RDF4J API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SNARL
SPARQL
Spring Data
Stardog Studio
TinkerPop 3

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

.Net
Clojure
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

proprietary syntax

user defined functions and aggregates, HTTP Server extensions in Java

Triggers

yes

via event handlers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

Sharding

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

none

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

Multi-source replication in HA-Cluster

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency in HA-Cluster

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

Access rights for users and roles

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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