DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. GridGain vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. XTDB

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. GridGain vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. XTDB

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

GridGain is an in-memory computing platform, built on Apache Ignite

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

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

A general purpose database with bitemporal SQL and Datalog and graph queries

Primary database model

Search engine

Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Document store

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	132.83
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	1.55
Rank	#150	Overall
	#26	Key-value stores
	#70	Relational DBMS

Score	821.56
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	0.18
Rank	#332	Overall
	#46	Document stores

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

www.gridgain.com

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

milvus.io

github.com/xtdb/xtdb
www.xtdb.com

Technical documentation

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

www.gridgain.com/docs/index.html

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

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

www.xtdb.com/docs

Developer

Elastic

GridGain Systems, Inc.

Microsoft

Juxt Ltd.

Initial release

2010

2007

1989

2019

Current release

8.6, January 2023

GridGain 8.5.1

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

2.3.4, January 2024

1.19, September 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

MIT License

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Implementation language

Java

Java, C++, .Net

C++

C++, Go

Clojure

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
Windows

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

All OS with a Java 8 (and higher) VM
Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

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

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

yes, extensible-data-notation format

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

ANSI-99 for query and DML statements, subset of DDL

yes

limited SQL, making use of Apache Calcite

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

HDFS API
Hibernate
JCache
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data

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

RESTful HTTP API

HTTP REST
JDBC

Supported programming languages

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

C#
C++
Java
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

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

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

Clojure
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

yes (compute grid and cache interceptors can be used instead)

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

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes (cache interceptors and events)

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

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

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

yes (replicated cache)

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

yes, each node contains all data

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

yes (compute grid and hadoop accelerator)

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

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

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, flexibel persistency by using storage technologies like Apache Kafka, RocksDB or LMDB

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

Security Hooks for custom implementations

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

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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