DBMS > 4D vs. Milvus vs. Snowflake vs. StarRocks

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Milvus vs. Snowflake vs. StarRocks

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

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

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

An open source, high-performance columnar analytical database that enables real-time, multi-dimensional, and highly concurrent data analytics

Forked from Apache Doris

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	2.47
Rank	#110	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#4	Vector DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	0.93
Rank	#198	Overall
	#93	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.starrocks.io/en-us/latest/introduction/StarRocks_intro

Developer

4D, Inc

Snowflake Computing Inc.

The Linux Foundation

since Feb 2023

Initial release

1984

2019

2014

2020

Current release

v20, April 2023

2.4.4, May 2024

3.3, June 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

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++, Go

C++, Java

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

hosted

Linux

Data scheme

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

yes

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

JDBC
MySQL protocol

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Java

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

yes

horizontal partitioning (by range and hash)

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

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

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

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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...
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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....
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Key customers

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