DBMS > Apache Impala vs. Google Cloud Datastore vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. VoltDB

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. Google Cloud Datastore vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. VoltDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

Automatically scaling NoSQL Database as a Service (DBaaS) on the Google Cloud Platform

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

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

Distributed In-Memory NewSQL RDBMS

Used for OLTP applications with a high frequency of relatively simple transactions, that can hold all their data in memory

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	13.77
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	4.47
Rank	#76	Overall
	#12	Document stores

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	1.44
Rank	#158	Overall
	#73	Relational DBMS

Website

impala.apache.org

cloud.google.com/datastore

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

milvus.io

www.voltdb.com

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

cloud.google.com/datastore/docs

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

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

docs.voltdb.com

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Google

Microsoft

VoltDB Inc.

Initial release

2013

2008

1989

2019

2010

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

2.3.4, January 2024

11.3, April 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

AGPL for Community Edition, commercial license for Enterprise, AWS, and Pro Editions

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

C++

C++, Go

Java, C++

Server operating systems

Linux

hosted

Linux
Windows

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux
OS X

for development

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes, details here

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

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

SQL-like query language (GQL)

yes

only a subset of SQL 99

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

RESTful HTTP API

Java API
JDBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

.Net
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
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++
Erlang

not officially supported
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

using Google App Engine

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

Java

Triggers

Callbacks using the Google Apps Engine

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Multi-source replication using Paxos

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

query execution via MapReduce

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on type of query and configuration

Strong Consistency is default for entity lookups and queries within an Entity Group (but can instead be made eventually consistent). Other queries are always eventual consistent.

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

via ReferenceProperties or Ancestor paths

yes

FOREIGN KEY constraints are not supported

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Serializable Isolation within Transactions, Read Committed outside of Transactions

ACID

Transactions are executed single-threaded within stored procedures

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Data access is serialized by the server

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Snapshots and command logging

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 for users, groups and roles

based on Apache Sentry and Kerberos

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

Users and roles with access to stored procedures

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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