DBMS > Alibaba Cloud PolarDB vs. ClickHouse vs. Firebird vs. HyperSQL vs. Milvus

System Properties Comparison Alibaba Cloud PolarDB vs. ClickHouse vs. Firebird vs. HyperSQL vs. Milvus

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A cloud-native relational database compatible with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle. Designed for business critical applications.

A high-performance, column-oriented SQL DBMS for online analytical processing (OLAP) that uses all available system resources to their full potential to process each analytical query as fast as possible. It is available as both an open-source software and a cloud offering.

Firebird is an open source RDBMS forked from Borland's InterBase

Multithreaded, transactional RDBMS written in Java

also known as HSQLDB

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

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

Score	0.66
Rank	#235	Overall
	#108	Relational DBMS

Score	15.55
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	20.50
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	3.23
Rank	#93	Overall
	#48	Relational DBMS

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#4	Vector DBMS

Website

www.alibabacloud.com/product/polardb

Technical documentation

www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/polardb/product-overview

clickhouse.com/docs

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

hsqldb.org/web/hsqlDocsFrame.html

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

Developer

Alibaba

Clickhouse Inc.

Firebird Foundation

Initial release

2016

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2001

2019

Current release

v24.4.2.141-stable, June 2024

5.0.0, January 2024

2.7.2, June 2023

2.4.4, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

based on BSD license

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.

DoubleCloud: Fully managed ClickHouse alongside best-in-class managed open-source services to build analytics at scale.
ClickHouse Cloud: Get the performance you love from open source ClickHouse in a serverless offering that takes care of the details so you can spend more time getting insight out of the fastest database on earth.
Aiven for Clickhouse: Managed cloud data warehousing with high-speed analytics.

Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Implementation language

C++

C and C++

Java

C++, Go

Server operating systems

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

Embedded (into Java applications) and Client-Server operating modes

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Data scheme

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

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 ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

gRPC
HTTP REST
JDBC
MySQL wire protocol
ODBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol
Proprietary protocol

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

HTTP API

JDBC via HTTP
JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

Java
Python

3rd party library
C++
Elixir

3rd party library
Go

3rd party library
Java

3rd party library
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party library
Kotlin

3rd party library
Nim

3rd party library
Perl

3rd party library
PHP

3rd party library
Python

3rd party library
R

3rd party library
Ruby

3rd party library
Rust
Scala

3rd party library

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC
Java

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

PSQL

Java, SQL

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

key based and custom

none

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Asynchronous and synchronous physical replication; geographically distributed replicas; support for object storages.

Source-replica replication

none

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

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

Features a multi-generational MVCC architecture, readers do not block writers

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights for users and roles. Column and row based policies. Quotas and resource limits. Pluggable authentication with LDAP and Kerberos. Password based, X.509 certificate, and SSH key authentication.

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

PolarDB, previously ApsaraDB for PolarDB, is a cloud-native relational database designed...
» more

Milvus is an open-source and cloud-native vector database built for production-ready...
» more

Competitive advantages

Webinar: Top Scientists Live: Tech Secrets to Double 11's Success Revealed. White...
» more

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
» more

Typical application scenarios

Creating a Robust Cloud-Based Database for Fintech, E-Commerce and Gaming. Learn...
» more

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

Specification and pricing. You can use either of the following billing methods to...
» more

Milvus was released under the open-source Apache License 2.0 in October 2019. Fully-managed...
» more

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.