DBMS > Apache Drill vs. Elasticsearch vs. Milvus vs. Realm vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Apache Drill vs. Elasticsearch vs. Milvus vs. Realm vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Schema-free SQL Query Engine for Hadoop, NoSQL and Cloud Storage

A distributed, RESTful modern search and analytics engine based on Apache Lucene

Elasticsearch lets you perform and combine many types of searches such as structured, unstructured, geo, and metric

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

A DBMS built for use on mobile devices that’s a fast, easy to use alternative to SQLite and Core Data

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Primary database model

Document store
Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

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

Score	1.95
Rank	#127	Overall
	#23	Document stores
	#60	Relational DBMS

Score	135.35
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	7.60
Rank	#52	Overall
	#9	Document stores

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

drill.apache.org

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

milvus.io

realm.io

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

drill.apache.org/docs

www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/index.html

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

realm.io/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Elastic

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2012

2010

2019

2014

Current release

1.20.3, January 2023

8.6, January 2023

2.3.4, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

Elastic License

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

commercial

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.

Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Implementation language

Java

C++, Go

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Android
Backend: server-less
iOS
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

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

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL SELECT statement is SQL:2003 compliant

SQL-like query language

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C++

.Net
Groovy
Community Contributed Clients
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

.Net
Java

with Android only
Objective-C
React Native
Swift

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

yes

runs within the applications so server-side scripts are unnecessary

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

Change Listeners

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

none

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

ES-Hadoop Connector

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

none

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

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

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

Depending on the underlying data source

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

Depending on the underlying data source

Memcached and Redis integration

yes

In-Memory realm

User concepts

Access control

Depending on the underlying data source

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

yes

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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...
» more

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,...
» more

Market metrics

As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

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

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