DBMS > Citus vs. Couchbase vs. H2 vs. MariaDB vs. Milvus

System Properties Comparison Citus vs. Couchbase vs. H2 vs. MariaDB vs. Milvus

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Scalable hybrid operational and analytics RDBMS for big data use cases based on PostgreSQL

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.

MySQL application compatible open source RDBMS, enhanced with high availability, security, interoperability and performance capabilities. MariaDB ColumnStore provides a column-oriented storage engine and MariaDB Xpand supports distributed SQL.

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

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store

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

Document store
Graph DBMS

with OQGraph storage engine
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.15
Rank	#117	Overall
	#56	Relational DBMS

Score	16.59
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	8.33
Rank	#46	Overall
	#30	Relational DBMS

Score	91.04
Rank	#13	Overall
	#9	Relational DBMS

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Website

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

milvus.io

Technical documentation

docs.citusdata.com

docs.couchbase.com

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Thomas Mueller

MariaDB Corporation Ab (MariaDB Enterprise),
MariaDB Foundation (community MariaDB Server)

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

Initial release

2010

2011

2005

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

2019

Current release

8.1, December 2018

Server: 7.2, June 2023; Mobile: 3.1, March 2022; Couchbase Capella (DBaaS), June 2023

2.2.220, July 2023

11.3.2, February 2024

2.3.4, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

Open Source

Business Source License (BSL 1.1); Commercial licenses also available

Open Source

dual-licence (Mozilla public license, Eclipse public license)

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription available

Open Source

Apache Version 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.

STACKIT MariaDB offers MariaDB in a fully managed version in enterprise grade, 100% GDPR-compliant.

Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Implementation language

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Java

C and C++

C++, Go

Server operating systems

Linux

Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

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

specific XML type available, but no XML query functionality

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

standard, with numerous extensions

SQL++, extends ANSI SQL to JSON for operational, transactional, and analytic use cases

yes

with proprietary extensions

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

CLI Client
HTTP REST
Kafka Connector
Native language bindings for CRUD, Query, Search and Analytics APIs
Spark Connector
Spring Data

JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Eiffel
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

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

Java Stored Procedures and User-Defined Functions

yes

PL/SQL compatibility added with version 10.3

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Automatic Sharding

none

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

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

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

not for in-memory storage engine

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

Ephemeral buckets

yes

with MEMORY storage engine

yes

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

MariaDB is the most powerful open source relational database – modern SQL and JSON...
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Milvus is an open-source and cloud-native vector database built for production-ready...
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Competitive advantages

MariaDB Servers have many features unavailable in other open source relational databases....
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Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
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Typical application scenarios

Web, SaaS and Cloud operational applications that require high availability, scalability...
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RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
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Key customers

Deutsche Bank, DBS Bank, Nasdaq, Red Hat, ServiceNow, Verizon and Walgreens Featured...
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Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
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Market metrics

MariaDB is the default database in the LAMP stack supplied by Red Hat and SUSE Linux,...
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As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
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Licensing and pricing models

MariaDB plc subscriptions cover our free, open source database, Community Server,...
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Milvus was released under the open-source Apache License 2.0 in October 2019. Fully-managed...
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