DBMS > Aerospike vs. Cassandra vs. Milvus vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Aerospike vs. Cassandra vs. Milvus vs. TimescaleDB

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Flash-optimized In-memory NoSQL Database

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

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

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Document store
Graph DBMS

leveraging Apache Tinkerpop
Key-value store
Spatial DBMS

Wide column store

Vector DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Relational DBMS

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

Score	5.78
Rank	#61	Overall
	#11	Document stores
	#3	Graph DBMS
	#7	Key-value stores
	#2	Spatial DBMS

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	4.64
Rank	#71	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

docs.aerospike.com

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

docs.timescale.com

Social network pages

Developer

Aerospike

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Timescale

Initial release

2012

2008

2019

2017

Current release

7.0, November 2023

4.1.3, July 2023

2.3.4, January 2024

2.13.0, November 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache and AGPL Licenses; open sourced in June 2014; commercial Enterprise Edition available

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Astra DB: Multi-cloud DBaaS built on Apache Cassandra.

Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Implementation language

Java

C++, Go

Server operating systems

Linux

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like SELECT, DML and DDL statements (CQL)

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
Proprietary protocol
TinkerPop Gremlin

Proprietary protocol

CQL (Cassandra Query Language, an SQL-like language)
Thrift

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C#
C++
Erlang
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

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

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

with Lua

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Aerospike Aggregation Framework is similar to Map/Reduce

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency in cross-datacenter configuration and Immediate Consistency in local cluster configuration

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

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

Atomic execution of operations

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

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

Access rights for users and roles

with Enterprise Edition only

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Aerospike is an enterprise-class, NoSQL database solution delivering predictable...
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Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
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Milvus is an open-source and cloud-native vector database built for production-ready...
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Competitive advantages

Optimized for use with SSDs (solid-state hard drives) Scales horizontally and vertically...
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No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
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Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
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Typical application scenarios

Aerospike excels in mission-critical applications that have mixed read/write workloads...
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Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
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RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
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Key customers

Nielsen, Williams-Sonoma, Inmobi, AppNexus, Telco (confidential), Financial Services...
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Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
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Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
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Market metrics

Aerospike's combination of speed, scalability, and reliability delivers 10x performance...
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Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
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As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
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Licensing and pricing models

Subscription-based Enterprise Edition and free, open-source Community Edition
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Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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Milvus was released under the open-source Apache License 2.0 in October 2019. Fully-managed...
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News

Aerospike Recognized by Independent Research Firm Among Notable Vendors in Vector Databases Report
7 May 2024

Aerospike Closes $109M in Growth Capital from Sumeru Equity Partners
4 April 2024

Aerospike Achieves the new AWS Advertising and Marketing Technology Competency
30 November 2023

Aerospike Showcases New Levels of Database Performance, Price, and Sustainability on Graviton3 at AWS re:Invent
28 November 2023

Aerospike Database 7 Delivers Enterprise Resiliency, Scale, and Speed to In-memory Database Workloads
15 November 2023

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