DBMS > Couchbase vs. H2 vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Milvus vs. ObjectBox

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. H2 vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Milvus vs. ObjectBox

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.

Search-as-a-service for web and mobile app development

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

Extremely fast embedded database for small devices, IoT and Mobile

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

Spatial DBMS

Vector DBMS

Time Series 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	5.59
Rank	#63	Overall
	#7	Search engines

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	1.20
Rank	#170	Overall
	#5	Object oriented DBMS

Website

www.couchbase.com

www.h2database.com

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/search

milvus.io

objectbox.io

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

docs.objectbox.io

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Thomas Mueller

Microsoft

ObjectBox Limited

Initial release

2011

2005

2015

2019

2017

Current release

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

2.2.220, July 2023

2.3.4, January 2024

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

Apache License 2.0

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

Java

C++, Go

C and C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Android
iOS
Linux
macOS
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

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

RESTful HTTP API

Proprietary native API

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

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

C
C++
Dart
Go
Java
JavaScript

planned (as of Jan 2019)
Kotlin
Python

planned (as of Jan 2019)
Swift

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

Java Stored Procedures and User-Defined Functions

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

none

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

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

online/offline synchronization between client and server

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

using Azure authentication

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...
» 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

News

Edge AI: The era of on-device AI
23 April 2024

In-Memory Database Use Cases
15 February 2024

Data Viewer for Objects – announcing ObjectBox Admin
14 November 2023

Vector Databases for Edge AI
9 August 2023

Vector Database Release for Flutter / Dart + Python
13 June 2023

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and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.