DBMS > 4D vs. Microsoft Azure Table Storage vs. Milvus vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Microsoft Azure Table Storage 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 Wide Column Store for rapid development using massive semi-structured datasets

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

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

Score	2.47
Rank	#110	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	4.04
Rank	#77	Overall
	#6	Wide column stores

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#4	Vector DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/storage/tables

milvus.io

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

4D, Inc

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

1984

2012

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

schema-free

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

RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

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

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. Replication either local, cross-facility or geo-redundant.

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

optimistic locking

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

Access rights based on private key authentication or shared access signatures

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

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...
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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...
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