DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Milvus vs. searchxml vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Milvus vs. searchxml vs. Snowflake

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.

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

DBMS for structured and unstructured content wrapped with an application server

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

Primary database model

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Native XML DBMS
Search engine

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

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

Score	132.83
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	2.84
Rank	#100	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	0.03
Rank	#390	Overall
	#7	Native XML DBMS
	#24	Search engines

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

cloud.google.com/spanner

milvus.io

www.searchxml.net/category/products

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

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

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

www.searchxml.net/support/handouts

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Elastic

Google

informationpartners gmbh

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2010

2017

2019

2015

2014

Current release

8.6, January 2023

2.3.4, January 2024

1.0

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic 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

Java

C++, Go

C++

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

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

yes

schema-free

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

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

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

RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP API
WebDAV
XQuery
XSLT

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

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

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

C++

most other programming languages supported via APIs

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

on the application server

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

yes

sychronisation to multiple collections

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

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

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

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

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

multiple readers, single writer

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.

Memcached and Redis integration

yes

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

Domain, group and role-based access control at the document level and for application services

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...
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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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