DBMS > DuckDB vs. Kinetica vs. Milvus vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison DuckDB vs. Kinetica vs. Milvus vs. Snowflake

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

An embeddable, in-process, column-oriented SQL OLAP RDBMS

Fully vectorized database across both GPUs and CPUs

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

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

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

Score	4.57
Rank	#74	Overall
	#40	Relational DBMS

Score	0.64
Rank	#236	Overall
	#109	Relational DBMS

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

duckdb.org/docs

docs.kinetica.com

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Kinetica

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2018

2012

2019

2014

Current release

0.10, February 2024

7.1, August 2021

2.3.4, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

MIT License

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

commercial

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, C++

C++, Go

Server operating systems

server-less

Linux

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

hosted

Data scheme

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

APIs and other access methods

Arrow Database Connectivity (ADBC)
CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C
C#

3rd party driver
C++
Crystal

3rd party driver
Go

3rd party driver
Java
Lisp

3rd party driver
Python
R
Ruby

3rd party driver
Rust
Swift
Zig

3rd party driver

C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

triggers when inserted values for one or more columns fall within a specified range

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

Source-replica replication

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

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, 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

GPU vRAM or System RAM

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users and roles on table level

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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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