DBMS > 4D vs. H2 vs. Milvus vs. ObjectBox vs. SAP HANA

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. H2 vs. Milvus vs. ObjectBox vs. SAP HANA

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

Full-featured RDBMS with a small footprint, either embedded into a Java application or used as a database server.

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

Lightweight, fast on-device database for IoT, Mobile and Embedded devices, persisting and synchronising objects and vectors

In-memory, column based data store. Available as appliance or cloud service

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Object oriented DBMS
Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

with SAP Hana, Enterprise Edition
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.37
Rank	#110	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	7.57
Rank	#47	Overall
	#30	Relational DBMS

Score	3.01
Rank	#89	Overall
	#4	Vector DBMS

Score	1.08
Rank	#179	Overall
	#6	Object oriented DBMS
	#9	Vector DBMS

Score	41.32
Rank	#23	Overall
	#16	Relational DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

www.h2database.com

milvus.io

github.com/objectbox
objectbox.io

www.sap.com/products/hana.html

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

docs.objectbox.io

help.sap.com/hana

Developer

4D, Inc

Thomas Mueller

ObjectBox Limited

SAP

Initial release

1984

2005

2019

2017

2010

Current release

v20, April 2023

2.2.220, July 2023

2.4.4, May 2024

4.0 (May 2024)

2.0 SPS07 (April 4, 2023), April 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

dual-licence (Mozilla public license, Eclipse public license)

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Bindings are released under Apache 2.0

Apache License 2.0

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

also available as a cloud based service

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

Java

C++, Go

C and C++

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Android
Any POSIX system
Docker
iOS
Linux
macOS
QNX
Windows

Appliance or cloud-service

Data scheme

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

yes, plus "flex" map-like types

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

Proprietary native API

JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

Java

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

C
C++
Dart (Flutter)
Go
Java
Kotlin
Python
Swift

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Java Stored Procedures and User-Defined Functions

SQLScript, R

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

none

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

With clustering: 2 database servers on different computers operate on identical copies of a database

Data sync between devices allowing occasional connected databases to work completely offline

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

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

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

yes

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

News

MongoDB Realm & Device Sync alternatives – ObjectBox
17 September 2024

Local AI – what it is and why we need it
11 September 2024

First on-device Vector Database (aka Semantic Index) for iOS
24 July 2024

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) with vector databases: Expanding AI Capabilities
18 June 2024

The on-device Vector Database for Android and Java
29 May 2024

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.