DBMS > ClickHouse vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Milvus vs. NebulaGraph

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Milvus vs. NebulaGraph

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A high-performance, column-oriented SQL DBMS for online analytical processing (OLAP) that uses all available system resources to their full potential to process each analytical query as fast as possible. It is available as both an open-source software and a cloud offering.

A horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service. It is the externalization of the core Google database that runs the biggest aspects of Google, like Ads and Google Play.

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

A distributed, linear scalable, high perfomant Graph DBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Graph DBMS

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

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

Score	15.55
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	2.84
Rank	#100	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#4	Vector DBMS

Score	2.23
Rank	#116	Overall
	#10	Graph DBMS

Website

clickhouse.com

cloud.google.com/spanner

milvus.io

github.com/vesoft-inc/nebula
www.nebula-graph.io

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

docs.nebula-graph.io

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

Google

Vesoft Inc.

Initial release

2016

2017

2019

Current release

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

2.4.4, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0 + Common Clause 1.0

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.

Aiven for Clickhouse: Managed cloud data warehousing with high-speed analytics.
ClickHouse Cloud: Get the performance you love from open source ClickHouse in a serverless offering that takes care of the details so you can spend more time getting insight out of the fastest database on earth.
DoubleCloud: Fully managed ClickHouse alongside best-in-class managed open-source services to build analytics at scale.

Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Implementation language

C++

C++, Go

C++

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

hosted

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux

Data scheme

yes

Strong typed schema

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

Nebula Graph internally uses the Key-Value store RocksDB for persistency. The vertices, edges, and their properties are stored as Key while their values are stored as Value. The primary indexes are per Key and secondary indexes are per Value.

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

gRPC
HTTP REST
JDBC
MySQL wire protocol
ODBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol
Proprietary protocol

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP API

Browser interface
console (shell)
Cypher Query Language
GO Object Graph Mapper
Java Object Graph Mapper
NGBatis

ORM framework for NebulaGraph and Spring-Boot
Proprietary native API
Python Object Graph Mapper
Query language nGQL

Supported programming languages

3rd party library
C++
Elixir

3rd party library
Go

3rd party library
Java

3rd party library
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party library
Kotlin

3rd party library
Nim

3rd party library
Perl

3rd party library
PHP

3rd party library
Python

3rd party library
R

3rd party library
Ruby

3rd party library
Rust
Scala

3rd party library

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

.Net
C++
Go
Java
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

key based and custom

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Asynchronous and synchronous physical replication; geographically distributed replicas; support for object storages.

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

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

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

using RocksDB

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 and roles. Column and row based policies. Quotas and resource limits. Pluggable authentication with LDAP and Kerberos. Password based, X.509 certificate, and SSH key authentication.

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

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

Role-based access control

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Milvus is an open-source and cloud-native vector database built for production-ready...
» more

NebulaGraph is a truly distributed, linearly scalable, lightning-fast graph database,...
» more

Competitive advantages

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
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NebulaGraph boasts the world's only graph database solution that is able to host...
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Typical application scenarios

RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
» more

Social networking Fraud detection Knowledge graph Data warehouse management Anti...
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Key customers

Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
» more

Companies from a variety of industries have implemented NebulaGraph Database in production,...
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Market metrics

As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
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At our very early stage, NebulaGraph has already received over 10,000 stars on GitHub...
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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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NebulaGraph is open source and free to use under Apache 2.0 license.
» more

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