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

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

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

An AI-native realtime vector database engine that integrates scalable machine learning models.

Primary database model

Document store
Relational 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	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	1.73
Rank	#143	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Website

alasql.org

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

milvus.io

www.snowflake.com

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

github.com/AlaSQL/alasql

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

Andrey Gershun & Mathias R. Wulff

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2014

1992

2019

2014

2019

Current release

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

2.3.4, January 2024

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

MIT-License

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

commercial

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate 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

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

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

yes

string, int, float, geo point, date, cross reference, fuzzy references

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

all data objects are indexed in a semantic vector space (the Contextionary), all primitive fields are indexed

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

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

JavaScript API

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

yes

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

yes

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

Eventual 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

but no files for transaction logging

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using IndexedDB, SQL.JS or proprietary FileStorage

yes

but no files for transaction logging

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

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

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

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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Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
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Competitive advantages

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
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Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
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Typical application scenarios

RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
» more

As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
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Key customers

Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
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All companies that have data.
» more

Market metrics

As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
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As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
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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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Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
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