DBMS > AlaSQL vs. Microsoft Access vs. Milvus vs. Snowflake vs. Tarantool

System Properties Comparison AlaSQL vs. Microsoft Access vs. Milvus vs. Snowflake vs. Tarantool

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

JavaScript DBMS library

Microsoft Access combines a backend RDBMS (JET / ACE Engine) with a GUI frontend for data manipulation and queries.

The Access frontend is often used for accessing other datasources (DBMS, Excel, etc.)

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

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

In-memory computing platform with a flexible data schema for efficiently building high-performance applications

Primary database model

Document store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

Document store
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

with Tarantool/GIS extension

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	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	1.72
Rank	#144	Overall
	#25	Document stores
	#25	Key-value stores
	#66	Relational DBMS

Website

alasql.org

www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/access

milvus.io

www.snowflake.com

www.tarantool.io

Technical documentation

github.com/AlaSQL/alasql

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

www.tarantool.io/en/doc

Developer

Andrey Gershun & Mathias R. Wulff

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2014

1992

2019

2014

2008

Current release

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

2.3.4, January 2024

2.10.0, May 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

MIT-License

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

commercial

Open Source

BSD-2, source-available extensions (modules), commercial licenses for Tarantool Enterprise

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

C++

C++, Go

C and C++

Server operating systems

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

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

hosted

BSD
Linux
macOS

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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

Flexible data schema: relational definition for tables with ability to store json-like documents in columns

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

yes

string, double, decimal, uuid, integer, blob, boolean, datetime

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

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

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

yes

Full-featured ANSI SQL support

APIs and other access methods

JavaScript API

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Open binary protocol

Supported programming languages

JavaScript

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java (JDBC-ODBC)
VBA
Visual Basic.NET

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C
C#
C++
Erlang
Go
Java
JavaScript
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Rust

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

user defined functions

Lua, C and SQL stored procedures

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes, before/after data modification events, on replication events, client session events

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

yes

Sharding, partitioned with virtual buckets by user defined affinity key. Live resharding for scale up and scale down without maintenance downtime.

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

yes

Asynchronous replication with multi-master option
Configurable replication topology (full-mesh, chain, star)
Synchronous quorum replication (with Raft)

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

none

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Casual consistency across sharding partitions
Eventual consistency within replicaset partition

when using asyncronous replication
Immediate Consistency within single instance
Sequential consistency including linearizable read within replicaset partition

when using Raft

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

but no files for transaction logging

ACID

ACID, with serializable isolation and linearizable read (within partition); Configurable MVCC (within partition); No cross-shard distributed transactions

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, cooperative multitasking

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using IndexedDB, SQL.JS or proprietary FileStorage

yes

but no files for transaction logging

yes

yes, write ahead logging

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

yes, full featured in-memory storage engine with persistence

User concepts

Access control

a simple user-level security was built in till version Access 2003

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

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

Access Control Lists
Mutual TLS authentication for Tarantol Enterprise
Password based authentication
Role-based access control (RBAC) and LDAP for Tarantol Enterprise
Users and Roles

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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Competitive advantages

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Typical application scenarios

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Key customers

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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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