DBMS > 4D vs. Aerospike vs. Milvus vs. Snowflake vs. TiDB

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Aerospike vs. Milvus vs. Snowflake vs. TiDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

Flash-optimized In-memory NoSQL Database

A DBMS designed for efficient storage of vector data and vector similarity searches

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

TiDB is an open source distributed SQL database that supports Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) workloads. It is MySQL compatible and features horizontal scalability, strong consistency, and high availability.

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

leveraging Apache Tinkerpop
Key-value store
Spatial DBMS

Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

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

Score	2.58
Rank	#108	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	5.78
Rank	#61	Overall
	#11	Document stores
	#3	Graph DBMS
	#7	Key-value stores
	#2	Spatial DBMS

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	4.66
Rank	#70	Overall
	#38	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

docs.aerospike.com

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.pingcap.com/tidb/stable

Social network pages

Developer

4D, Inc

Aerospike

Snowflake Computing Inc.

PingCAP, Inc.

Initial release

1984

2012

2019

2014

2016

Current release

v20, April 2023

7.0, November 2023

2.3.4, January 2024

8.0.0, March 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache and AGPL Licenses; open sourced in June 2014; commercial Enterprise Edition available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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

Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

TiDB Cloud: Fully-managed TiDB Service. Bring everything great about TiDB to the cloud.

Implementation language

C++, Go

Go, Rust

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

Linux

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

hosted

Linux

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

yes

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

yes

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

JDBC
Proprietary protocol
TinkerPop Gremlin

RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

GORM
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
SQLAlchemy

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

.Net
C
C#
C++
Erlang
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

with Lua

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

yes

horizontal partitioning (by key range)

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

selectable replication factor

yes

Using Raft consensus algorithm to ensure data replication with strong consistency among multiple replicas.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Aerospike Aggregation Framework is similar to Map/Reduce

yes

with TiSpark Connector

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency in cross-datacenter configuration and Immediate Consistency in local cluster configuration

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

full support since version 6.6

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Atomic execution of operations

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

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

Users and groups

Access rights for users and roles

with Enterprise Edition only

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

Fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Aerospike is an enterprise-class, NoSQL database solution delivering predictable...
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Milvus is an open-source and cloud-native vector database built for production-ready...
» more

TiDB is an advanced open-source, distributed SQL database for modern application...
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Competitive advantages

Optimized for use with SSDs (solid-state hard drives) Scales horizontally and vertically...
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Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
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- HORIZONTAL SCALING : TiDB grants total transparency into your data workloads without...
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Typical application scenarios

Aerospike excels in mission-critical applications that have mixed read/write workloads...
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RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
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TiDB is ideal for transactional applications that require extreme scalability and...
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Key customers

Nielsen, Williams-Sonoma, Inmobi, AppNexus, Telco (confidential), Financial Services...
» more

Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
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Block, Pinterest, Catalyst, Bolt, Flipkart, Capcom, Shopee (E-commerce), JD Cloud...
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Market metrics

Aerospike's combination of speed, scalability, and reliability delivers 10x performance...
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As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
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34K+ GitHub stars 5K+ members in TiDB Community Slack 1K+ community contributors...
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Licensing and pricing models

Subscription-based Enterprise Edition and free, open-source Community Edition
» more

Milvus was released under the open-source Apache License 2.0 in October 2019. Fully-managed...
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TiDB Community : Free open source software (Apache 2.0) TiDB Self-Hosted : Enterprise...
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News

New Aerospike Release Lets Enterprises Consolidate Expensive Legacy Cache And Database Platforms
15 May 2024

Aerospike Recognized by Independent Research Firm Among Notable Vendors in Vector Databases Report
7 May 2024

Aerospike Closes $109M in Growth Capital from Sumeru Equity Partners
4 April 2024

Aerospike Achieves the new AWS Advertising and Marketing Technology Competency
30 November 2023

Aerospike Showcases New Levels of Database Performance, Price, and Sustainability on Graviton3 at AWS re:Invent
28 November 2023

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and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.