DBMS > Pinecone vs. Snowflake vs. Solr vs. Sphinx vs. Splice Machine

System Properties Comparison Pinecone vs. Snowflake vs. Solr vs. Sphinx vs. Splice Machine

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A managed, cloud-native vector database

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

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

Open-Source SQL RDBMS for Operational and Analytical use cases with native Machine Learning, powered by Hadoop and Spark

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	3.23
Rank	#92	Overall
	#2	Vector DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	41.02
Rank	#24	Overall
	#3	Search engines

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	0.54
Rank	#252	Overall
	#115	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

docs.pinecone.io/docs/overview

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

solr.apache.org/resources.html

sphinxsearch.com/docs

splicemachine.com/how-it-works

Developer

Pinecone Systems, Inc

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Apache Software Foundation

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Splice Machine

Initial release

2019

2014

2006

2001

2014

Current release

9.6.1, May 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

3.1, March 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

AGPL 3.0, commercial license 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

Java

C++

Java

Server operating systems

hosted

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

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

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

yes

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

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

String, Number, Boolean

yes

supports customizable data types and automatic typing

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 search fields are automatically indexed

yes

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Solr Parallel SQL Interface

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Proprietary protocol

JDBC
Native Spark Datasource
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.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

C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
R
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

Java plugins

yes

Java

Triggers

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

User configurable commands triggered on index changes

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

yes

Sharding

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

Shared Nothhing Auto-Sharding, Columnar Partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

none

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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

Yes, via Full Spark Integration

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

optimistic locking

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

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, user roles and pluggable authentication

yes

Access rights for users, groups and roles according to SQL-standard

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