DBMS > 4D vs. Alibaba Cloud PolarDB vs. Milvus vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Alibaba Cloud PolarDB vs. Milvus vs. Snowflake

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

A cloud-native relational database compatible with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle. Designed for business critical applications.

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

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	2.47
Rank	#110	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	0.66
Rank	#235	Overall
	#108	Relational DBMS

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#4	Vector DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

www.alibabacloud.com/product/polardb

milvus.io

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/polardb/product-overview

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

4D, Inc

Alibaba

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

1984

2019

2014

Current release

v20, April 2023

2.4.4, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

commercial

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

Implementation language

C++, Go

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

hosted

Data scheme

yes

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

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
ODBC

RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

Java
Python

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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Competitive advantages

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Typical application scenarios

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Key customers

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Market metrics

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Licensing and pricing models

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