DBMS > Couchbase vs. Heroic vs. IBM Db2 vs. Milvus vs. Realm

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. Heroic vs. IBM Db2 vs. Milvus vs. Realm

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

Time Series DBMS built at Spotify based on Cassandra or Google Cloud Bigtable, and ElasticSearch

Common in IBM host environments, 2 different versions for host and Windows/Linux

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

A DBMS built for use on mobile devices that’s a fast, easy to use alternative to SQLite and Core Data

Primary database model

Document store

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

Since Version 10.5 support for JSON/BSON documents compatible with MongoDB

Vector DBMS

Document store

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
RDF store

in Db2 LUW (Linux, Unix, Windows)
Spatial DBMS

with Db2 Spatial Extender

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

Score	16.59
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	0.46
Rank	#265	Overall
	#22	Time Series DBMS

Score	125.90
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	7.41
Rank	#52	Overall
	#8	Document stores

Website

www.couchbase.com

github.com/spotify/heroic

www.ibm.com/products/db2

milvus.io

realm.io

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

spotify.github.io/heroic

www.ibm.com/docs/en/db2

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

realm.io/docs

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Spotify

IBM

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

Initial release

2011

2014

1983

host version

2019

2014

Current release

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

12.1, October 2016

2.3.4, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

free version is available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

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 and C++

C++, Go

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Windows
z/OS

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Android
Backend: server-less
iOS
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

via Elasticsearch

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

HQL (Heroic Query Language, a JSON-based language)
HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
JSON style queries

MongoDB compatible
ODBC
XQuery

RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C
C#
C++
Cobol
Delphi
Fortran
Java
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Visual Basic

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

.Net
Java

with Android only
Objective-C
React Native
Swift

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

yes

runs within the applications so server-side scripts are unnecessary

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

Change Listeners

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

only with Windows/Unix/Linux Version

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

yes

with separate tools (MQ, InfoSphere)

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

Eventual Consistency
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

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

In-Memory realm

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

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

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