DBMS > 4D vs. Google Cloud Bigtable vs. Kingbase vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Milvus

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Google Cloud Bigtable vs. Kingbase vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Milvus

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

Google's NoSQL Big Data database service. It's the same database that powers many core Google services, including Search, Analytics, Maps, and Gmail.

An enterprise-class RDBMS compatible with PostgreSQL and Oracle and widely used in China.

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial 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	3.26
Rank	#92	Overall
	#13	Key-value stores
	#8	Wide column stores

Score	0.45
Rank	#262	Overall
	#123	Relational DBMS

Score	29.04
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

cloud.google.com/bigtable

www.kingbase.com.cn

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

milvus.io

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

Developer

4D, Inc

Google

BeiJing KINGBASE Information technologies inc.

Microsoft

Initial release

1984

2015

1999

2014

2019

Current release

v20, April 2023

V8.0, August 2021

2.3.4, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 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

Implementation language

C and Java

C++, Go

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
Windows

hosted

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

Vector, Numeric and String

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

All properties auto-indexed by default

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

Standard with numerous extensions

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
HappyBase (Python library)
HBase compatible API (Java)

ADO.NET
gokb
JDBC
kdbndp
ODBC
PDI
PDO
Pro*C
psycopg2
QT

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

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

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

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

JavaScript

Triggers

yes

JavaScript

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

horizontal partitioning (by range, list and hash) and vertical partitioning

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

Internal replication in Colossus, and regional replication between two clusters in different zones

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Immediate consistency (for a single cluster), Eventual consistency (for two or more replicated clusters)

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Atomic single-row operations

ACID

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

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, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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

Competitive advantages

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
» more

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

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.