DBMS > RethinkDB vs. SAP HANA vs. Sphinx vs. SwayDB vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison RethinkDB vs. SAP HANA vs. Sphinx vs. SwayDB vs. Weaviate

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

DBMS for the Web with a mechanism to push updated query results to applications in realtime.

In-memory, column based data store. Available as appliance or cloud service

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

An embeddable, non-blocking, type-safe key-value store for single or multiple disks and in-memory storage

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

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

with SAP Hana, Enterprise Edition
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.58
Rank	#105	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	41.32
Rank	#23	Overall
	#16	Relational DBMS

Score	5.97
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	0.00
Rank	#384	Overall
	#60	Key-value stores

Score	1.48
Rank	#149	Overall
	#8	Vector DBMS

Website

rethinkdb.com

www.sap.com/products/hana.html

sphinxsearch.com

swaydb.simer.au

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

rethinkdb.com/docs

help.sap.com/hana

sphinxsearch.com/docs

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

The Linux Foundation

since July 2017

SAP

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Simer Plaha

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2009

2010

2001

2018

2019

Current release

2.4.1, August 2020

2.0 SPS07 (April 4, 2023), April 2023

3.5.1, February 2023

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

GNU Affero GPL V3.0

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate Enterprise

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

also available as a cloud based service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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

Implementation language

C++

Scala

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

Appliance or cloud-service

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, binary, float, bool, date, geometry

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

full-text index on all search fields

yes

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

community-supported driver
C#

community-supported driver
C++

community-supported driver
Clojure

community-supported driver
Dart

community-supported driver
Erlang

community-supported driver
Go

community-supported driver
Haskell

community-supported driver
Java

official driver
JavaScript (Node.js)

official driver
Lisp

community-supported driver
Lua

community-supported driver
Objective-C

community-supported driver
Perl

community-supported driver
PHP

community-supported driver
Python

official driver
Ruby

official driver
Scala

community-supported driver

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Java
Kotlin
Scala

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

SQLScript, R

Triggers

Client-side triggers through changefeeds

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

range based

yes

Sharding

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

none

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

yes

none

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

Atomic single-document operations

ACID

Atomic execution of operations

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

MVCC based

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

yes

users and table-level permissions

yes

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,...
» more

Competitive advantages

Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
» more

Typical application scenarios

As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
» more

Key customers

All companies that have data.
» more

Market metrics

As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
» more

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.