Elastic DB is an object store. The objects are retrieved directly using the Elastic programming language, then, after processing they are stored back. This is the basic platform functionality. Currently, all popular database engines (MS SQL, MySQL, Oracle, SQLite, Firebird and etc.) use tables and fields to store data, not objects. To work with objects, so called ORM systems were designed, for ex., the Hibernate library for Java. But basically ORM is an extension between application software and database engine, which is complex and hard to use, let alone the fact that Elastic is much easier to study than Java.
The Elastic DB stores objects in collections, where each object may contain sub-collections. It also has built-in SQL-like language, very close to the standard with some extensions required to handle objects and hierarchy. By hierarchy is meant the ability of each object to contain sub-collections of other objects and so on. Originally the database engine was designed to support object inheritance, but these features are not widely tested yet.
The SELECT query in the Elastic DB retrieves a set of objects, however, retrieval of object properties is also possible. A single collection may contain objects of various types giving more capability for complex systems, like management systems.
The database is transactional and may be used in financial systems (billing for ex.).
The Elastic supports MySQL (and MS SQL support is also possible), allowing to import any MySQL database into Elastic DB without any problems. Currently, there is no support for other programming languages in Elastic DB, but it can be made easy.