DBMS > Couchbase vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Milvus vs. Oracle vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Milvus vs. Oracle vs. Sphinx

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

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

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

Widely used RDBMS

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Primary database model

column oriented

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

If a column is of type dynamic docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/scalar-data-types/dynamic then it's possible to add arbitrary JSON documents in this cell
Event Store

this is the general usage pattern at Microsoft. Billing, Logs, Telemetry events are stored in ADX and the state of an individual entity is defined by the arg_max(timestamps)
Spatial DBMS
Search engine

support for complex search expressions docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/parseoperator FTS, Geospatial docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/geo-point-to-geohash-function distributed search -> ADX acts as a distributed search engine
Time Series DBMS

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer/time-series-analysis

Document store
Graph DBMS

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
RDF store

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
Spatial DBMS

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
Vector DBMS

since Oracle 23

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

Score	16.59
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#4	Vector DBMS

Score	1244.08
Rank	#1	Overall
	#1	Relational DBMS

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

www.couchbase.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

milvus.io

www.oracle.com/database

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

docs.oracle.com/en/database

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Microsoft

Oracle

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2011

2019

1980

2001

Current release

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

cloud service with continuous releases

2.4.4, May 2024

23c, September 2023

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence 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

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows
z/OS

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

Schemaless in JSON and XML columns

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

bool, datetime, dynamic, guid, int, long, real, string, timespan, double: docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/scalar-data-types

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

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

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

with proprietary extensions

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

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

Microsoft SQL Server communication protocol (MS-TDS)
RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PowerShell
Python
R

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

C
C#
C++
Clojure
Cobol
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Fortran
Groovy
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Objective C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Tcl
Visual Basic

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

PL/SQL

also stored procedures in Java possible

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/management/updatepolicy

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service. Replication either local, cross-facility or geo-redundant.

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Spark connector (open source): github.com/Azure/azure-kusto-spark

can be realized in PL/SQL

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

isolation level can be parameterized

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

Ephemeral buckets

yes

Version 12c introduced the new option 'Oracle Database In-Memory'

User concepts

Access control

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

Azure Active Directory Authentication

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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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