DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. Oracle vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. Oracle vs. Sphinx

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Hosted, scalable database service by Amazon with the data stored in Amazons cloud

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

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

Widely used RDBMS

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
RDF store

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
Spatial DBMS

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
Vector DBMS

since Oracle 23

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

Score	74.07
Rank	#17	Overall
	#3	Document stores
	#2	Key-value stores

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	1236.29
Rank	#1	Overall
	#1	Relational DBMS

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

milvus.io

www.oracle.com/database

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

docs.oracle.com/en/database

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Amazon

Microsoft

Oracle

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2012

1989

2019

1980

2001

Current release

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

2.3.4, January 2024

23c, September 2023

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Implementation language

C++

C++, Go

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
Windows

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows
z/OS

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Schemaless in JSON and XML columns

yes

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

with proprietary extensions

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

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

C
C#
C++
Clojure
Cobol
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Fortran
Groovy
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Objective C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Tcl
Visual Basic

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

PL/SQL

also stored procedures in Java possible

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

Sharding

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

can be realized in PL/SQL

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

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 across one or more tables within a single AWS account and region

ACID

isolation level can be parameterized

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

Version 12c introduced the new option 'Oracle Database In-Memory'

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users and roles can be defined via the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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

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....
» more

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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