DBMS > Couchbase vs. Graph Engine vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Milvus vs. Spark SQL

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. Graph Engine vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Milvus vs. Spark SQL

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 in-memory data processing engine, underpinned by a strongly-typed RAM store and a general distributed computation engine

A high performance, column-oriented RDBMS, specifically developed to harness the massive parallelism of modern CPU and GPU hardware

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

Spark SQL is a component on top of 'Spark Core' for structured data processing

Primary database model

Document store

Graph DBMS
Key-value store

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	16.59
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	0.67
Rank	#232	Overall
	#21	Graph DBMS
	#34	Key-value stores

Score	1.64
Rank	#145	Overall
	#67	Relational DBMS

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	18.04
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Website

www.couchbase.com

www.graphengine.io

github.com/heavyai/heavydb
www.heavy.ai

milvus.io

spark.apache.org/sql

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

www.graphengine.io/docs/manual

docs.heavy.ai

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

spark.apache.org/docs/latest/sql-programming-guide.html

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Microsoft

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

Apache Software Foundation

Initial release

2011

2010

2016

2019

2014

Current release

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

5.10, January 2022

2.3.4, January 2024

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

Open Source

MIT License

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition 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)

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

.NET and C

C++ and CUDA

C++, Go

Scala

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

.NET

Linux

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux
OS X
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.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

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

RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C#
C++
F#
Visual Basic

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

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

Java
Python
R
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

yes

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

horizontal partitioning

Sharding

Round robin

Sharding

yes, utilizing Spark Core

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication

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

selectable on a per-operation basis

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

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

optional: either by committing a write-ahead log (WAL) to the local persistent storage or by dumping the memory to a persistent storage

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.

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...
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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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