DBMS > CouchDB vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. Milvus vs. OpenSearch vs. PouchDB

System Properties Comparison CouchDB vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. Milvus vs. OpenSearch vs. PouchDB

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.

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 distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine forked from Elasticsearch and based on Apache Lucene

JavaScript DBMS with an API inspired by CouchDB

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Vector DBMS

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

Score	8.30
Rank	#47	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	76.78
Rank	#16	Overall
	#11	Relational DBMS

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#4	Vector DBMS

Score	16.03
Rank	#37	Overall
	#4	Search engines

Score	2.34
Rank	#112	Overall
	#21	Document stores

Website

couchdb.apache.org

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

milvus.io

github.com/opensearch-project
opensearch.org

pouchdb.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

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

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

opensearch.org/docs/latest

pouchdb.com/guides

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

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

Microsoft

Amazon Web Services

Apache Software Foundation

Initial release

2005

2010

2019

2021

2012

Current release

3.3.3, December 2023

V12

2.4.4, May 2024

2.5.0, January 2023

7.1.1, June 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

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.

Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Aiven for OpenSearch: Fully managed open source search and analytics suite. Out-of-the-box integrations get you up and running in a couple of clicks.
STACKIT OpenSearch offers OpenSearch in a managed version in enterprise grade, 100% GDPR-compliant, for a wide range of applications like analytics, website search, offering scalability and fast data access.

Implementation language

Erlang

C++

C++, Go

Java

JavaScript

Server operating systems

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

All OS with a Java VM

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

schema-free

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

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

via views

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP API

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

HTTP REST

only for PouchDB Server
JavaScript API

Supported programming languages

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

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

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

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

Elasticsearch client

JavaScript

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

Transact SQL

yes

View functions in JavaScript

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

Sharding

with a proxy-based framework, named couchdb-lounge

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes, with always 3 replicas available

yes

Multi-source replication

also with CouchDB databases
Source-replica replication

also with CouchDB databases

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

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

Eventual Consistency

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

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using IndexedDB, WebSQL or LevelDB as backend

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

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

OpenSearch is a highly scalable and extensible open-source software suite for search,...
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Competitive advantages

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
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Distributed as fully open source under Apache License, Version 2.0 (ALv2), OpenSearch...
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Typical application scenarios

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

The OpenSearch platform is used across a broad range of search , analytics, and observability...
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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...
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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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The OpenSearch Project offers open source software licensed under Apache License...
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