DBMS > Couchbase vs. H2 vs. InterSystems IRIS vs. Milvus vs. OpenQM

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. H2 vs. InterSystems IRIS vs. Milvus vs. OpenQM

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

Full-featured RDBMS with a small footprint, either embedded into a Java application or used as a database server.

A containerised multi-model DBMS, interoperability and analytics data platform with wide capabilities for vertical and horizontal scalability

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

QpenQM is a high-performance, self-tuning, multi-value DBMS

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

Document store
Key-value store
Object oriented DBMS
Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Multivalue 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	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	8.13
Rank	#49	Overall
	#31	Relational DBMS

Score	4.05
Rank	#83	Overall
	#14	Document stores
	#10	Key-value stores
	#1	Object oriented DBMS
	#45	Relational DBMS

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	0.27
Rank	#298	Overall
	#10	Multivalue DBMS

Website

www.couchbase.com

www.h2database.com

www.intersystems.com/products/intersystems-iris

milvus.io

www.rocketsoftware.com/products/rocket-multivalue-application-development-platform/rocket-open-qm

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

docs.intersystems.com/irislatest/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Thomas Mueller

InterSystems

Rocket Software, originally Martin Phillips

Initial release

2011

2005

2018

2019

1993

Current release

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

2.2.220, July 2023

2023.3, June 2023

2.3.4, January 2024

3.4-12

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

Open Source

dual-licence (Mozilla public license, Eclipse public license)

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

GPLv2, extended commercial license 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.

Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Implementation language

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Java

C++, Go

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

AIX
Linux
macOS
Ubuntu
Windows

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

AIX
FreeBSD
Linux
macOS
Raspberry Pi
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

depending on used data model

yes

with some exceptions

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

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

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

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

JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java

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

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

.Net
Basic
C
Java
Objective C
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

Java Stored Procedures and User-Defined Functions

yes

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

none

Sharding

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

With clustering: 2 database servers on different computers operate on identical copies of a database

Source-replica replication

yes

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

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

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.

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

InterSystems IRIS is a complete cloud-first data platform which includes a multi-model...
» more

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

Competitive advantages

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

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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