DBMS > CouchDB vs. Firebird vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. YugabyteDB

System Properties Comparison CouchDB vs. Firebird vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. YugabyteDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A native JSON - document store inspired by Lotus Notes, scalable from globally distributed server-clusters down to mobile phones.

Firebird is an open source RDBMS forked from Borland's InterBase

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

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

High-performance distributed SQL database for global, internet-scale applications. Wire and feature compatible with PostgreSQL.

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Wide column store

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

Score	8.30
Rank	#47	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	20.50
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	821.56
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	2.63
Rank	#109	Overall
	#53	Relational DBMS

Website

couchdb.apache.org

www.firebirdsql.org

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

milvus.io

www.yugabyte.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

docs.yugabyte.com
github.com/yugabyte/yugabyte-db

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Damien Katz, a former Lotus Notes developer

Firebird Foundation

Microsoft

Yugabyte Inc.

Initial release

2005

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

1989

2019

2017

Current release

3.3.3, December 2023

5.0.0, January 2024

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

2.3.4, January 2024

2.19, September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

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Implementation language

Erlang

C and C++

C++

C++, Go

C and C++

Server operating systems

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux
Windows

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux
OS X

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

depending on used data model

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

yes

via views

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

yes, PostgreSQL compatible

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
YCQL, an SQL-based flexible-schema API with its roots in Cassandra Query Language
YSQL - a fully relational SQL API that is wire compatible with the SQL language in PostgreSQL

Supported programming languages

C
C#
ColdFusion
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
Ruby
Smalltalk

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

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

C
C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby
Rust
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

PSQL

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

yes

sql, plpgsql, C

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

none

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

Sharding

Hash and Range Sharding, row-level geo-partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Based on Raft distributed consensus protocol, minimum 3 replicas for continuous availability

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Strong consistency on writes and tunable consistency on reads

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

atomic operations within a single document possible

ACID

Distributed ACID with Serializable & Snapshot Isolation. Inspired by Google Spanner architecture.

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

yes

Features a multi-generational MVCC architecture, readers do not block writers

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

based on 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 can be defined per database

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

yes

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Milvus is an open-source and cloud-native vector database built for production-ready...
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YugabyteDB is an open source distributed SQL database for cloud native transactional...
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Competitive advantages

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
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PostgreSQL compatible: Get instantly productive with a PostgreSQL compatible RDBMS....
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Typical application scenarios

RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
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Systems of record and engagement for cloud native applications that require resilience,...
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Key customers

Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
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Market metrics

As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
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2 Million+ lifetime clusters deployed, 6.5K+ GitHub stars, 7K YugabyteDB Community...
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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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Apache 2.0 license for the database
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