Elastic’s OLAP Weaknesses

Elasticsearch is a powerful search and analytics engine built on Apache Lucene libraries, but it faces limitations when handling complex analytical workloads due to its NoSQL document-oriented structure lacking relational capabilities found in traditional SQL databases. This leads to challenges such as the need for workarounds like joining data across multiple tables, which can result in complex queries, slower query response times, and increased application complexity. Elasticsearch also struggles with data integrity issues, including lack of ACID transactions, eventual consistency models, and denormalization at ingest time, which can lead to inconsistencies, data duplication, and performance costs. In contrast, SingleStore provides a unified approach to vector search workloads, consolidating OLTP and OLAP capabilities into one platform, supporting real-time data freshness, full ANSI SQL, and ACID compliance, making it a more efficient solution for complex OLAP workloads compared to Elasticsearch.