DBMS > Apache Pinot vs. Milvus vs. QuestDB vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Apache Pinot vs. Milvus vs. QuestDB vs. Snowflake

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Realtime distributed OLAP datastore, designed to answer OLAP queries with low latency

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

A high performance open source SQL database for time series data

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

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Relational DBMS

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

Score	0.40
Rank	#270	Overall
	#125	Relational DBMS

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	2.52
Rank	#109	Overall
	#9	Time Series DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

docs.pinot.apache.org

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

questdb.io/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation and contributors

QuestDB Technology Inc

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2015

2019

2014

Current release

1.0.0, September 2023

2.3.4, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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

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

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java JDK11 or higher

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux
macOS
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free via InfluxDB Line Protocol

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

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

SQL with time-series extensions

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC

RESTful HTTP API

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
Python

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

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

over HTTP

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

Triggers

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

horizontal partitioning

Sharding

horizontal partitioning (by timestamps)

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication with eventual consistency

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

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 for single-table writes

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

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

through memory mapped files

User concepts

Access control

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

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

Relational model with native time series support Column-based storage and time partitioned...
» more

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...
» more

Open source Apache 2.0 QuestDB Enterprise QuestDB Cloud
» more

News

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5 April 2024

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