DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. LokiJS vs. Milvus vs. Oracle NoSQL

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. LokiJS vs. Milvus vs. Oracle NoSQL

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A distributed, RESTful modern search and analytics engine based on Apache Lucene

Elasticsearch lets you perform and combine many types of searches such as structured, unstructured, geo, and metric

A horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service. It is the externalization of the core Google database that runs the biggest aspects of Google, like Ads and Google Play.

In-memory JavaScript DBMS

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

A multi-model, scalable, distributed NoSQL database, designed to provide highly reliable, flexible, and available data management across a configurable set of storage nodes

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

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

Score	135.35
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	0.43
Rank	#264	Overall
	#42	Document stores

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	2.95
Rank	#100	Overall
	#17	Document stores
	#17	Key-value stores
	#50	Relational DBMS

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

cloud.google.com/spanner

github.com/techfort/LokiJS

milvus.io

www.oracle.com/database/nosql/technologies/nosql

Technical documentation

www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/index.html

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

techfort.github.io/LokiJS

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

docs.oracle.com/en/database/other-databases/nosql-database/index.html

Developer

Elastic

Google

Oracle

Initial release

2010

2017

2014

2019

2011

Current release

8.6, January 2023

2.3.4, January 2024

23.3, December 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Proprietary for Enterprise Edition (Oracle Database EE license has Oracle NoSQL database EE covered: details)

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

Java

JavaScript

C++, Go

Java

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux
Solaris SPARC/x86

Data scheme

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

yes

schema-free

Support Fixed schema and Schema-less deployment with the ability to interoperate between them.

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

optional

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

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

via views

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

JavaScript API

RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

.Net
Groovy
Community Contributed Clients
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

JavaScript

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

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

View functions in JavaScript

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

none

Electable source-replica replication per shard. Support distributed global deployment with Multi-region table feature

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

yes

with Hadoop integration

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

Immediate Consistency

none

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

depending on configuration

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integrity

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

atomic operations within a single collection possible

configurable

ACID within a storage node (=shard)

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Serialization of a DB in a Node.JS/Cordova/PhoneGap environment. Usage of the IndexedDB-API in a browser.

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

Memcached and Redis integration

yes

off heap cache

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

Access rights for users and roles

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

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More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

PostgreSQL is the DBMS of the Year 2017
2 January 2018, Paul Andlinger, Matthias Gelbmann

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3 July 2017, Matthias Gelbmann

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2 March 2016, Paul Andlinger

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New kids on the block: database management systems implemented in JavaScript
1 December 2014, Matthias Gelbmann

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2 June 2023, Matthias Gelbmann

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