DBMS > Couchbase vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Milvus vs. RavenDB vs. TypeDB

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Milvus vs. RavenDB vs. TypeDB

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 horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service. It is the externalization of the core Google database that runs the biggest aspects of Google, like Ads and Google Play.

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

Open Source Operational and Transactional Enterprise NoSQL Document Database

TypeDB is a strongly-typed database with a rich and logical type system and TypeQL as its query language

Primary database model

Graph DBMS
Relational DBMS

Often described as a 'hyper-relational' database, since it implements the 'Entity-Relationship Paradigm' to manage complex data structures and ontologies.

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

Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

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

Score	16.59
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	2.84
Rank	#100	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	2.84
Rank	#101	Overall
	#18	Document stores

Score	0.70
Rank	#230	Overall
	#20	Graph DBMS
	#106	Relational DBMS

Website

www.couchbase.com

cloud.google.com/spanner

milvus.io

ravendb.net

typedb.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

ravendb.net/docs

typedb.com/docs

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Google

Hibernating Rhinos

Vaticle

Initial release

2011

2017

2019

2010

2016

Current release

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

2.4.4, May 2024

5.4, July 2022

2.26.3, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

AGPL version 3, commercial license available

Open Source

GPL Version 3, commercial licenses available

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

Implementation language

C, C++, Go and Erlang

C++, Go

Java

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux
macOS
Raspberry Pi
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

SQL-like query language (RQL)

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

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP API

.NET Client API
F# Client API
Go Client API
Java Client API
NodeJS Client API
PHP Client API
Python Client API
RESTful HTTP API

gRPC protocol
TypeDB Console (shell)
TypeDB Studio (Visualisation software- previously TypeDB Workbase)

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

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

All JVM based languages
Groovy
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

yes

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

by using Cassandra

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

Multi-source replication

by using Cassandra

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

yes

by using Apache Kafka and Apache Zookeeper

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Default ACID transactions on the local node (eventually consistent across the cluster). Atomic operations with cluster-wide ACID transactions. Eventual consistency for indexes and full-text search indexes.

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integrity

substituted by the relationship feature

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID, Cluster-wide transaction available

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

yes

User concepts

Access control

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

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

Authorization levels configured per client per database

yes

at REST API level; other APIs in progress

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Milvus is an open-source and cloud-native vector database built for production-ready...
» more

TypeDB is a polymorphic database with a conceptual data model, a strong subtyping...
» more

Competitive advantages

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
» more

TypeDB provides a new level of expressivity, extensibility, interoperability, and...
» more

Typical application scenarios

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

Life sciences : TypeDB makes working with biological data much easier and accelerates...
» 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

Apache f or language drivers, and AGPL and Commercial for the database server. The...
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and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.