DBMS > CrateDB vs. Interbase vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison CrateDB vs. Interbase vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. TimescaleDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Distributed Database based on Lucene

Light-weight proven RDBMS

originally from Borland

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

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

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	0.73
Rank	#224	Overall
	#37	Document stores
	#5	Spatial DBMS
	#16	Search engines
	#19	Time Series DBMS
	#8	Vector DBMS

Score	4.61
Rank	#72	Overall
	#39	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	4.64
Rank	#71	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Website

cratedb.com

www.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

milvus.io

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

cratedb.com/docs

docs.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Crate

Embarcadero

Microsoft

Timescale

Initial release

2013

1984

1989

2019

2017

Current release

InterBase 2020, December 2019

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

2.3.4, January 2024

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is 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.

CrateDB Cloud: a distributed SQL database that spreads data and processing across an elastic cluster of shared nothing nodes. CrateDB Cloud enables data insights at scale on Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud Platform.

Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Implementation language

Java

C++

C++, Go

Server operating systems

All Operating Systems, including Kubernetes with CrateDB Kubernetes Operator support

Android
iOS
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
Windows

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

Flexible Schema (defined schema, partial schema, schema free)

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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.

export as XML data possible

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes, but no triggers and constraints, and PostgreSQL compatibility

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol
Prometheus Remote Read/Write
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

.NET
Erlang
Go

community maintained client
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

community maintained client
Perl

community maintained client
PHP
Python
R
Ruby

community maintained client
Scala

community maintained client

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java
Object Pascal
PHP
Ruby

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

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

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions (Javascript)

yes

Interbase procedure and trigger language

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

Sharding

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Configurable replication on table/partition-level

Interbase Change Views

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Read-after-write consistency on record level

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

unique row identifiers can be used for implementing an optimistic concurrency control strategy

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Multiversion concurreny control

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

User concepts

Access control

rights management via user accounts

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

The enterprise database for time series, documents, and vectors. Distributed - Native...
» more

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

Competitive advantages

Response time in milliseconds: e ven for complex ad-hoc queries. Massive scaling...
» more

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
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Typical application scenarios

IoT: accelerate your IIoT projects with CrateDB, delivering real-time analytics...
» more

RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
» more

Key customers

Across all continents, CrateDB is used by companies of all sizes to meet the most...
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Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
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Market metrics

The CrateDB open source project was started in 2013 Honorable Mention in 2021 Gartner®...
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As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
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Licensing and pricing models

See CrateDB pricing >
» more

Milvus was released under the open-source Apache License 2.0 in October 2019. Fully-managed...
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