DBMS > Citus vs. Milvus vs. SAP HANA vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Citus vs. Milvus vs. SAP HANA vs. TimescaleDB

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

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

In-memory, column based data store. Available as appliance or cloud service

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store

Document store
Graph DBMS

with SAP Hana, Enterprise Edition
Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	2.15
Rank	#117	Overall
	#56	Relational DBMS

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	44.27
Rank	#23	Overall
	#16	Relational DBMS

Score	4.46
Rank	#71	Overall
	#5	Time Series DBMS

Website

www.citusdata.com

milvus.io

www.sap.com/products/hana.html

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

docs.citusdata.com

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

help.sap.com/hana

docs.timescale.com

Developer

SAP

Timescale

Initial release

2010

2019

2010

2017

Current release

8.1, December 2018

2.4.4, May 2024

2.0 SPS07 (April 4, 2023), April 2023

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

also available as a cloud based service

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++, Go

Server operating systems

Linux

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Appliance or cloud-service

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

yes

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

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

RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC

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

Supported programming languages

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

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

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

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

SQLScript, R

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

yes

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

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

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

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

yes

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,...
» 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...
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