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

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

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

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

A high performance open source SQL database for time series data

Primary database model

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

Spatial DBMS

Relational 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	8.13
Rank	#49	Overall
	#31	Relational DBMS

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	2.52
Rank	#109	Overall
	#9	Time Series DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

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

docs.couchbase.com

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

questdb.io/docs

Developer

Altibase

Couchbase, Inc.

Thomas Mueller

QuestDB Technology Inc

Initial release

1999

2011

2005

2019

2014

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

Open Source

Apache 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.

Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Implementation language

C++

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Java

C++, Go

Java (Zero-GC), C++, Rust

Server operating systems

AIX
HP-UX
Linux

Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free via InfluxDB Line Protocol

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

yes

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

SQL with time-series extensions

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

JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP API

HTTP REST
InfluxDB Line Protocol (TCP/UDP)
JDBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol

Supported programming languages

C
C++
Java

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java

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

PostgreSQL driver
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Rust

over HTTP

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

stored procedures and stored functions

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

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

none

Sharding

horizontal partitioning (by timestamps)

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

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

Source-replica replication with eventual consistency

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

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

ACID

ACID for single-table writes

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

through memory mapped files

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.

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

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

Relational model with native time series support Column-based storage and time partitioned...
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Competitive advantages

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
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High ingestion throughput: peak of 4M rows/sec (TSBS Benchmark) Code optimizations...
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Typical application scenarios

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

Financial tick data Industrial IoT Application Metrics Monitoring
» more

Key customers

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

Banks & Hedge funds, Yahoo, OKX, Airbus, Aquis Exchange, Net App, Cloudera, Airtel,...
» more

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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Open source Apache 2.0 QuestDB Enterprise QuestDB Cloud
» more

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