DBMS > PostgreSQL vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison PostgreSQL vs. Sphinx

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Widely used open source RDBMS

Developed as objectoriented DBMS (Postgres), gradually enhanced with 'standards' like SQL

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

with object oriented extensions, e.g.: user defined types/functions and inheritance. Handling of key/value pairs with hstore module.

Search engine

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS

with Apache Age
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

with pgvector extension

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

Score	674.32
Rank	#4	Overall
	#4	Relational DBMS

Score	5.72
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

www.postgresql.org

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

www.postgresql.org/docs

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

PostgreSQL Global Development Group

www.postgresql.org/developer

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

1989

1989: Postgres, 1996: PostgreSQL

2001

Current release

16.4, August 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

BSD

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence 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

FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
NetBSD
OpenBSD
OS X
Solaris
Unix
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

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

specific XML-type available, but no XML query functionality.

Secondary indexes

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

standard with numerous extensions

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

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

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

partitioning by range, list and (since PostgreSQL 11) by hash

Sharding

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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

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.

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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