DBMS > CouchDB vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. SpaceTime vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison CouchDB vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. SpaceTime vs. Sphinx

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.

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

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

SpaceTime is a spatio-temporal DBMS with a focus on performance.

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	9.30
Rank	#45	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#7	Spatial DBMS

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

couchdb.apache.org

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

milvus.io

www.mireo.com/spacetime

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

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

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

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

Microsoft

Mireo

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2005

1989

2019

2020

2001

Current release

3.3.3, December 2023

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

2.3.4, January 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

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Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Implementation language

Erlang

C++

C++, Go

C++

Server operating systems

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
Windows

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

A subset of ANSI SQL is implemented

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

RESTful HTTP API

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

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

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

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

C#
C++
Python

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

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

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

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

Sharding

Fixed-grid hypercubes

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Real-time block device replication (DRBD)

none

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

Immediate 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

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

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

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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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...
» more

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