Elasticsearch vs. RavenDB

Elasticsearch is a really scalable solution that can fit a lot of needs, but the bigger and/or those needs become, the more understanding & infrastructure you will need for your instance to be running correctly. Elasticsearch is not problem-free - you can get yourself in a lot of trouble if you are not following good practices and/or if are not managing the cluster correctly. Licensing is a big decision point here as Elasticsearch is a middleware component - be sure to read the licensing agreement of the version you want to try before you commit to it. Same goes for long-term support - be sure to keep yourself in the know for this aspect you may end up stuck with an unpatched version for years.

Incentivized

If you're a.NET developer searching for a system other than SQL Server for business assessment, then you must try RavenDB. RavenDB is a fantastic document-oriented system that has been specifically developed to work with all.NET or Windows systems. Developers are continually working on such systems to eliminate their flaws while also providing a few benefits. We must refresh ourselves on a regular basis since the free software system is like an open area where anybody may stand up with a brilliant solution to the issue. RavenDB is absolutely worth a look

• As I mentioned before, Elasticsearch's flexible data model is unparalleled. You can nest fields as deeply as you want, have as many fields as you want, but whatever you want in those fields (as long as it stays the same type), and all of it will be searchable and you don't need to even declare a schema beforehand!
• Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, is super strong financially and they have a great team of devs and product managers working on Elasticsearch. When I first started using ES 3 years ago, I was 90% impressed and knew it would be a good fit. 3 years later, I am 200% impressed and blown away by how far it has come and gotten even better. If there are features that are missing or you don't think it's fast enough right now, I bet it'll be suitable next year because the team behind it is so dang fast!
• Elasticsearch is really, really stable. It takes a lot to bring down a cluster. It's self-balancing algorithms, leader-election system, self-healing properties are state of the art. We've never seen network failures or hard-drive corruption or CPU bugs bring down an ES cluster.

Incentivized

• Document Database - no Object-Relational Impedance Mismatch
• ACID support that is optimized for performance
• Can be easily integrated into automated tests (unit tests)
• Easily configurable via C# code
• Comes directly with RavenStudio - no SSMS or SQL Developer required
• In general low footprint when it comes to memory and disk consumption
• Useful safety nets for new developers - e.g. by default an exception is thrown when you make too many requests within a session

• Joining data requires duplicate de-normalized documents that make parent child relationships. It is hard and requires a lot of synchronizations
• Tracking errors in the data in the logs can be hard, and sometimes recurring errors blow up the error logs
• Schema changes require complete reindexing of an index

Incentivized

• The documentation is very good, but it's sometimes hard to find the topic I'm looking for.
• Updating references is done manually. It would be nice if there was a feature to help with that. I'm not sure that's even possible though.

We're pretty heavily invested in ElasticSearch at this point, and there aren't any obvious negatives that would make us reconsider this decision.

Incentivized

We've had an excellent experience using RavenDB. Internally we are testing the newer features in 5.0 such as time series, which will effect the con specified previously dependent on the real world performance. We foresee that BattleCrate will continue to use RavenDB as we grow.

To get started with Elasticsearch, you don't have to get very involved in configuring what really is an incredibly complex system under the hood. You simply install the package, run the service, and you're immediately able to begin using it. You don't need to learn any sort of query language to add data to Elasticsearch or perform some basic searching. If you're used to any sort of RESTful API, getting started with Elasticsearch is a breeze. If you've never interacted with a RESTful API directly, the journey may be a little more bumpy. Overall, though, it's incredibly simple to use for what it's doing under the covers.

Incentivized

Really good .NET client that is very easy to use. The management studio is excellent and puts anything that Microsoft or Oracle have to shame. Very quick to develop with once the complexity hurdle has been overcome. Initially using it can be a bit painful until you fully grasp the event sourced nature of the indexing.

We've only used it as an opensource tooling. We did not purchase any additional support to roll out the elasticsearch software. When rolling out the application on our platform we've used the documentation which was available online. During our test phases we did not experience any bugs or issues so we did not rely on support at all.

Incentivized

The support is really fast and flexible. Since one single working day, we got a response to our first request, only 4 days later we got a technical demonstration for our complete developer team to get in touch with raven and its performance. Also during our development, we got a quick response to questions.

Do not mix data and master roles. Dedicate at least 3 nodes just for Master

Incentivized

RavenFS changed along the way and made us change the codes.

As far as we are concerned, Elasticsearch is the gold standard and we have barely evaluated any alternatives. You could consider it an alternative to a relational or NoSQL database, so in cases where those suffice, you don't need Elasticsearch. But if you want powerful text-based search capabilities across large data sets, Elasticsearch is the way to go.

Incentivized

The given alternatives are also powerful and really good noSQL databases but the highest availability of RavenDB allows me/us to know it a lot better. RavenDB is encrypted by default wherever we use it in production and it has a high level of documents compression.

• We have had great luck with implementing Elasticsearch for our search and analytics use cases.
• While the operational burden is not minimal, operating a cluster of servers, using a custom query language, writing Elasticsearch-specific bulk insert code, the performance and the relative operational ease of Elasticsearch are unparalleled.
• We've easily saved hundreds of thousands of dollars implementing Elasticsearch vs. RDBMS vs. other no-SQL solutions for our specific set of problems.

Incentivized

• RavenDB has saved my customers a lot of money with their cloud services' tiered model. The database is able to grow with the project/company and can start out small at a low cost.
• RavenDB is free for three nodes and three CPUs, which makes it great for development scenarios. You're able to start rapidly building applications without having to worry about licensing.
• Scaling out has allowed us to use three small cloud servers when starting out and get the performance and throughput of a single larger server.