Elasticsearch vs Rockset
Compare and contrast Elasticsearch and Rockset by architecture, ingestion, queries, performance, and scalability.
Elasticsearch vs Rockset Architecture
Elasticsearch is an open-source distributed search engine built on Apache Lucene, a full text search library. Elasticsearch is a distributed system, which means that it is designed to operate across multiple nodes, each responsible for a part of the data.
Rockset is built to be a cloud-only database and does not have a self-managed option. It disaggregates compute from both hot storage and cloud storage, allowing multiple isolated compute clusters to run on the same shared data.
Elasticsearch vs Rockset Ingestion
Elasticsearch has a number of integrations as well as a REST API. It is a NoSQL database and natively supports semi-structured data. Transformations typically occur upstream so that data can be modeled for optimal performance before it is indexed in Elasticsearch.
Rockset has built-in connectors that manage streaming ingestion from common data sources. It has native support for semi-structured data, so that nested JSON and XML can be ingested and queried as is.
Elasticsearch vs Rockset Performance
Elasticsearch is a search engine that utilizes an inverted index. Although this approach leads to storage amplification, it also enables low-latency queries that demand less computation. Elasticsearch is tailored to accommodate large scale, append-only data such as logs, events, and metrics. To manage frequently updated data, users often utilize the Bulk API to minimize computational costs and ensure consistent query performance.
Rockset is designed to make streaming data queryable as quickly as possible by avoiding the need to batch data. It also updates documents efficiently by only reindexing fields that are part of an update request. Rockset indexes all data by default, which results in storage amplification but also enables low-latency queries that require less compute.
Elasticsearch vs Rockset Queries
Elasticsearch has its own domain specific language (DSL) based on JSON. Joins are not a first class citizen in Elasticsearch requiring a number of complex and expensive workarounds. Elasticsearch is known for its developer tooling and supports a number of client libraries. Kibana is the visualization layer for Elasticsearch and is frequently used for log analytics and monitoring.
Rockset supports SQL as its native query language and can perform SQL joins. Users can create data APIs by storing SQL queries in Rockset that are executed from dedicated REST endpoints. Rockset integrates with some common visualization tools, but BI is not Rockset’s primary use case.
Elasticsearch vs Rockset Scalability
Elasticsearch is horizontally scalable and can scale by adding more nodes to the cluster. Its tightly coupled architecture means that compute and storage scale together for performance. This often results in resource contention and overprovisioning. Scaling Elasticsearch often requires deep expertise as there are many levels of the system that need to be managed- the server, operating system, network and software.
Rockset Virtual Instances are distributed compute clusters that can be scaled up for faster queries or scaled out for practically unlimited concurrency or if compute isolation is needed. Rockset has shared storage that scales automatically and independently, so no rebalancing is required.