DBMS > 4D vs. Firebird vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. Quasardb

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Firebird vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. Quasardb

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

Firebird is an open source RDBMS forked from Borland's InterBase

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

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

Distributed, high-performance timeseries database

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.58
Rank	#108	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	0.14
Rank	#332	Overall
	#29	Time Series DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

www.firebirdsql.org

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

milvus.io

quasar.ai

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

doc.quasar.ai/master

Developer

4D, Inc

Firebird Foundation

Microsoft

quasardb

Initial release

1984

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

1989

2019

2009

Current release

v20, April 2023

5.0.0, January 2024

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

2.3.4, January 2024

3.14.1, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

commercial

Free community edition, Non-profit organizations and non-commercial usage are eligible for free licenses

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Implementation language

C and C++

C++

C++, Go

C++

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux
Windows

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

yes

integer and binary

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

with tags

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

yes

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

RESTful HTTP API

HTTP API

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

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

.Net
C
C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

PSQL

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

Sharding

consistent hashing

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

Source-replica replication

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Source-replica replication with selectable replication factor

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

with Hadoop integration

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

Features a multi-generational MVCC architecture, readers do not block writers

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using LevelDB

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

Transient mode

User concepts

Access control

Users and groups

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

Cryptographically strong user authentication and audit trail

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Milvus is an open-source and cloud-native vector database built for production-ready...
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Competitive advantages

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
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Typical application scenarios

RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
» more

Key customers

Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
» more

Market metrics

As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Milvus was released under the open-source Apache License 2.0 in October 2019. Fully-managed...
» more

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