DBMS > Altibase vs. Couchbase vs. CrateDB vs. H2 vs. Milvus

System Properties Comparison Altibase vs. Couchbase vs. CrateDB vs. H2 vs. Milvus

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

An enterprise grade, high-performance RDBMS

A distributed document store with integrated cache, a powerful search engine, in-built operational and analytical capabilities, and an embedded mobile database

Distributed Database based on Lucene

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Key-value store

originating from the former Membase product and supporting the Memcached protocol
Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	1.07
Rank	#186	Overall
	#87	Relational DBMS

Score	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	0.73
Rank	#224	Overall
	#37	Document stores
	#5	Spatial DBMS
	#16	Search engines
	#19	Time Series DBMS
	#8	Vector DBMS

Score	8.13
Rank	#49	Overall
	#31	Relational DBMS

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

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

docs.couchbase.com

cratedb.com/docs

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

Developer

Altibase

Couchbase, Inc.

Crate

Thomas Mueller

Initial release

1999

2011

2013

2005

2019

Current release

v7.3, 2023, August 2023

Server: 7.2, June 2023; Mobile: 3.1, March 2022; Couchbase Capella (DBaaS), June 2023

2.2.220, July 2023

2.3.4, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open source edition discontinued with March 2023

Open Source

Business Source License (BSL 1.1); Commercial licenses also available

Open Source

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

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

CrateDB Cloud: a distributed SQL database that spreads data and processing across an elastic cluster of shared nothing nodes. CrateDB Cloud enables data insights at scale on Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud Platform.

Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Implementation language

C++

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Java

C++, Go

Server operating systems

AIX
HP-UX
Linux

Linux
OS X
Windows

All Operating Systems, including Kubernetes with CrateDB Kubernetes Operator support

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Flexible Schema (defined schema, partial schema, schema free)

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

ANSI SQL-92

SQL++, extends ANSI SQL to JSON for operational, transactional, and analytic use cases

yes, but no triggers and constraints, and PostgreSQL compatibility

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol

CLI Client
HTTP REST
Kafka Connector
Native language bindings for CRUD, Query, Search and Analytics APIs
Spark Connector
Spring Data

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol
Prometheus Remote Read/Write
RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

C
C++
Java

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.NET
Erlang
Go

community maintained client
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

community maintained client
Perl

community maintained client
PHP
Python
R
Ruby

community maintained client
Scala

community maintained client

Java

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

stored procedures and stored functions

Functions and timers in JavaScript and UDFs in Java, Python, SQL++

user defined functions (Javascript)

Java Stored Procedures and User-Defined Functions

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

none

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Configurable replication on table/partition-level

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

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Eventual Consistency
Read-after-write consistency on record level

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

unique row identifiers can be used for implementing an optimistic concurrency control strategy

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

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

Ephemeral buckets

yes

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

User and Administrator separation with password-based and LDAP integrated Authentication. Role-base access control.

rights management via user accounts

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

The enterprise database for time series, documents, and vectors. Distributed - Native...
» more

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

Competitive advantages

Response time in milliseconds: e ven for complex ad-hoc queries. Massive scaling...
» more

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

IoT: accelerate your IIoT projects with CrateDB, delivering real-time analytics...
» more

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

Key customers

Across all continents, CrateDB is used by companies of all sizes to meet the most...
» more

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

Market metrics

The CrateDB open source project was started in 2013 Honorable Mention in 2021 Gartner®...
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As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
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Licensing and pricing models

See CrateDB pricing >
» more

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