DBMS > 4D vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Milvus vs. MySQL vs. Vertica

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Milvus vs. MySQL vs. Vertica

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

A high performance, column-oriented RDBMS, specifically developed to harness the massive parallelism of modern CPU and GPU hardware

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

Widely used open source RDBMS

Cloud or off-cloud analytical database and query engine for structured and semi-structured streaming and batch data. Machine learning platform with built-in algorithms, data preparation capabilities, and model evaluation and management via SQL or Python.

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Relational DBMS

Column oriented

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS

Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

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

Score	2.47
Rank	#110	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	1.64
Rank	#145	Overall
	#67	Relational DBMS

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#4	Vector DBMS

Score	1061.34
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	10.06
Rank	#42	Overall
	#26	Relational DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

github.com/heavyai/heavydb
www.heavy.ai

milvus.io

www.mysql.com

www.vertica.com

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

docs.heavy.ai

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

dev.mysql.com/doc

vertica.com/documentation

Developer

4D, Inc

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

OpenText

previously Micro Focus and Hewlett Packard

Initial release

1984

2016

2019

1995

2005

Current release

v20, April 2023

5.10, January 2022

2.4.4, May 2024

8.4.0, April 2024

12.0.3, January 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

commercial

Limited community edition free

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

on-premises, all major clouds - Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and containers

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

Aiven for MySQL: Fully managed MySQL, deployable in the cloud of your choice, with seamless integrations and lightning-fast setup.

Implementation language

C++ and CUDA

C++, Go

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

Linux

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

yes

Yes, but also semi-structure/unstructured data storage, and complex hierarchical data (like Parquet) stored and/or queried.

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

No Indexes Required. Different internal optimization strategy, but same functionality included.

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

yes

with proprietary extensions

Full 1999 standard plus machine learning, time series and geospatial. Over 650 functions.

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

ADO.NET
JDBC
Kafka Connector
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API
Spark Connector
vSQL

character-based, interactive, front-end utility

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

C++
Go
Java
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

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

proprietary syntax

yes, PostgreSQL PL/pgSQL, with minor differences

Triggers

yes

yes, called Custom Alerts

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Round robin

Sharding

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

horizontal partitioning, hierarchical partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication

One, or more copies of data replicated across nodes, or object-store used for repository.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Bi-directional Spark 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

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

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

no user groups or roles

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard; supports Kerberos, LDAP, Ident and hash

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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Deploy-anywhere database for large-scale analytical deployments. Deploy off-cloud,...
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Competitive advantages

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
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Fast, scalable, and capable of high concurrency. Separation of compute/storage leverages...
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Typical application scenarios

RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
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Communication and network analytics, Embedded analytics, Fraud monitoring and Risk...
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Key customers

Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
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Abiba Systems, Adform, adMarketplace, AmeriPride, Anritsu, AOL, Avito, Auckland Transport,...
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Market metrics

As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
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Licensing and pricing models

Milvus was released under the open-source Apache License 2.0 in October 2019. Fully-managed...
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Cost-based models and subscription-based models are both available. One license is...
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and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.