DBMS > AlaSQL vs. H2 vs. Milvus vs. Postgres-XL vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison AlaSQL vs. H2 vs. Milvus vs. Postgres-XL vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

JavaScript DBMS library

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

Based on PostgreSQL enhanced with MPP and write-scale-out cluster features

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

Primary database model

Document store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	0.46
Rank	#260	Overall
	#40	Document stores
	#121	Relational DBMS

Score	8.13
Rank	#49	Overall
	#31	Relational DBMS

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	0.49
Rank	#256	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

github.com/AlaSQL/alasql

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Andrey Gershun & Mathias R. Wulff

Thomas Mueller

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2014

2005

2019

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

2014

Current release

2.2.220, July 2023

2.3.4, January 2024

10 R1, October 2018

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

MIT-License

Open Source

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

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Mozilla public license

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

JavaScript

Java

C++, Go

Server operating systems

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux
macOS

hosted

Data scheme

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

XML type, but no XML query functionality

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to SQL99, but no user access control, stored procedures and host language bindings.

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

yes

APIs and other access methods

JavaScript API

JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP API

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

JavaScript

Java

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

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Erlang
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Java Stored Procedures and User-Defined Functions

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

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

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

none

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

yes

only for local storage and DOM-storage

ACID

MVCC

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using IndexedDB, SQL.JS or proprietary FileStorage

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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...
» 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

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