DBMS > Alibaba Cloud Table Store vs. Altibase vs. ClickHouse vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Milvus

System Properties Comparison Alibaba Cloud Table Store vs. Altibase vs. ClickHouse vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Milvus

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A fully managed Wide Column Store for large quantities of semi-structured data with real-time access

An enterprise grade, high-performance RDBMS

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.

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

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

Primary database model

Wide column store

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

Document store

If a column is of type dynamic docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/scalar-data-types/dynamic then it's possible to add arbitrary JSON documents in this cell
Event Store

this is the general usage pattern at Microsoft. Billing, Logs, Telemetry events are stored in ADX and the state of an individual entity is defined by the arg_max(timestamps)
Spatial DBMS
Search engine

support for complex search expressions docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/parseoperator FTS, Geospatial docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/geo-point-to-geohash-function distributed search -> ADX acts as a distributed search engine
Time Series DBMS

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer/time-series-analysis

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

Score	0.31
Rank	#297	Overall
	#11	Wide column stores

Score	1.02
Rank	#189	Overall
	#88	Relational DBMS

Score	15.55
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#4	Vector DBMS

Website

www.alibabacloud.com/product/table-store

altibase.com

clickhouse.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

milvus.io

Technical documentation

www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/tablestore

github.com/ALTIBASE/Documents/tree/master/Manuals

clickhouse.com/docs

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

Developer

Alibaba

Altibase

Clickhouse Inc.

Microsoft

Initial release

2016

1999

2016

2019

Current release

v7.3, 2023, August 2023

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

cloud service with continuous releases

2.4.4, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open source edition discontinued with March 2023

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

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.

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Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Implementation language

C++

C++, Go

Server operating systems

hosted

AIX
HP-UX
Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

hosted

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

bool, datetime, dynamic, guid, int, long, real, string, timespan, double: docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/scalar-data-types

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

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

ANSI SQL-92

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

APIs and other access methods

HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol

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

Microsoft SQL Server communication protocol (MS-TDS)
RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

Java
Python

C
C++
Java

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

.Net
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PowerShell
Python
R

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

stored procedures and stored functions

yes

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Triggers

yes

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/management/updatepolicy

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

key based and custom

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

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

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service. Replication either local, cross-facility or geo-redundant.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Spark connector (open source): github.com/Azure/azure-kusto-spark

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
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

Atomic single-row 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 based on subaccounts and tokens

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.

Azure Active Directory Authentication

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

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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Competitive advantages

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
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Typical application scenarios

RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
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Key customers

Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
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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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