DBMS > Couchbase vs. Elasticsearch vs. Milvus vs. Stardog

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. Elasticsearch vs. Milvus vs. Stardog

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A distributed document store with integrated cache, a powerful search engine, in-built operational and analytical capabilities, and an embedded mobile database

A distributed, RESTful modern search and analytics engine based on Apache Lucene

Elasticsearch lets you perform and combine many types of searches such as structured, unstructured, geo, and metric

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

Enterprise Knowledge Graph platform and graph DBMS with high availability, high performance reasoning, and virtualization

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Key-value store

originating from the former Membase product and supporting the Memcached protocol
Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

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

Score	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	135.35
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	2.02
Rank	#123	Overall
	#11	Graph DBMS
	#6	RDF stores

Website

www.couchbase.com

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

milvus.io

www.stardog.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/index.html

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

docs.stardog.com

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Elastic

Stardog-Union

Initial release

2011

2010

2019

2010

Current release

Server: 7.2, June 2023; Mobile: 3.1, March 2022; Couchbase Capella (DBaaS), June 2023

8.6, January 2023

2.3.4, January 2024

7.3.0, May 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Business Source License (BSL 1.1); Commercial licenses also available

Open Source

Elastic License

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

commercial

60-day fully-featured trial license; 1-year fully-featured non-commercial use license for academics/students

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.

Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Implementation language

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Java

C++, Go

Java

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

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

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support

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.

Import/export of XML data possible

Secondary indexes

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

supports real-time indexing in full-text and geospatial

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL++, extends ANSI SQL to JSON for operational, transactional, and analytic use cases

SQL-like query language

Yes, compatible with all major SQL variants through dedicated BI/SQL Server

APIs and other access methods

CLI Client
HTTP REST
Kafka Connector
Native language bindings for CRUD, Query, Search and Analytics APIs
Spark Connector
Spring Data

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

RESTful HTTP API

GraphQL query language
HTTP API
Jena RDF API
OWL
RDF4J API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SNARL
SPARQL
Spring Data
Stardog Studio
TinkerPop 3

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
Groovy
Community Contributed Clients
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

.Net
Clojure
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Functions and timers in JavaScript and UDFs in Java, Python, SQL++

yes

user defined functions and aggregates, HTTP Server extensions in Java

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

via event handlers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Multi-source replication in HA-Cluster

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

ES-Hadoop Connector

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Eventual Consistency

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

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Immediate Consistency in HA-Cluster

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

relationships in graphs

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

Ephemeral buckets

Memcached and Redis integration

yes

User concepts

Access control

User and Administrator separation with password-based and LDAP integrated Authentication. Role-base access control.

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

Access rights for users and roles

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....
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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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Licensing and pricing models

Milvus was released under the open-source Apache License 2.0 in October 2019. Fully-managed...
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