DBMS > ClickHouse vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. Milvus vs. Pinecone

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. Milvus vs. Pinecone

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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.

Database as a Service offering with high compatibility to Microsoft SQL Server

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

A managed, cloud-native vector database

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	16.34
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	77.99
Rank	#16	Overall
	#11	Relational DBMS

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	3.16
Rank	#95	Overall
	#2	Vector DBMS

Website

clickhouse.com

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/azure-sql/database

milvus.io

www.pinecone.io

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

docs.pinecone.io/docs/overview

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

Microsoft

Pinecone Systems, Inc

Initial release

2016

2010

2019

Current release

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

V12

2.3.4, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 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.

Aiven for Clickhouse: Managed cloud data warehousing with high-speed analytics.
DoubleCloud: Fully managed ClickHouse alongside best-in-class managed open-source services to build analytics at scale.
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.

Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Implementation language

C++

C++, Go

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

hosted

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

hosted

Data scheme

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

String, Number, Boolean

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

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

yes

APIs and other access methods

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP API

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

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Transact SQL

Triggers

yes

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.

yes, with always 3 replicas available

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

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

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.

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

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...
» more

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...
» more

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