DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. MariaDB vs. Milvus vs. SurrealDB vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. MariaDB vs. Milvus vs. SurrealDB vs. Weaviate

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

MySQL application compatible open source RDBMS, enhanced with high availability, security, interoperability and performance capabilities. MariaDB ColumnStore provides a column-oriented storage engine and MariaDB Xpand supports distributed SQL.

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

A fully ACID transactional, developer-friendly, multi-model DBMS

An AI-native realtime vector database engine that integrates scalable machine learning models.

Primary database model

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

with OQGraph storage engine
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	135.35
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	93.21
Rank	#13	Overall
	#9	Relational DBMS

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	0.86
Rank	#203	Overall
	#34	Document stores
	#18	Graph DBMS

Score	1.73
Rank	#143	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

milvus.io

surrealdb.com

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

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

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

surrealdb.com/docs

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

Elastic

MariaDB Corporation Ab (MariaDB Enterprise),
MariaDB Foundation (community MariaDB Server)

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

SurrealDB Ltd

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2010

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

2019

2022

2019

Current release

8.6, January 2023

11.3.2, February 2024

2.3.4, January 2024

v1.1.1, January 2024

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate Enterprise

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.

Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Implementation language

Java

C and C++

C++, Go

Rust

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

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

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

schema-free

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

yes

string, int, float, geo point, date, cross reference, fuzzy references

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

all data objects are indexed in a semantic vector space (the Contextionary), all primitive fields are indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

with proprietary extensions

SQL-like query language

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

RESTful HTTP API

GraphQL
RESTful HTTP API
WebSocket

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

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

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Eiffel
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

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

Deno
Go
JavaScript (Node.js)
Rust

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

PL/SQL compatibility added with version 10.3

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

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

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

not for in-memory storage engine

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

with MEMORY storage engine

yes

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

yes, based on authentication and database rules

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

MariaDB is the most powerful open source relational database – modern SQL and JSON...
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Milvus is an open-source and cloud-native vector database built for production-ready...
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Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
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Competitive advantages

MariaDB Servers have many features unavailable in other open source relational databases....
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Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
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Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
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Typical application scenarios

Web, SaaS and Cloud operational applications that require high availability, scalability...
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RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
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As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
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Key customers

Deutsche Bank, DBS Bank, Nasdaq, Red Hat, ServiceNow, Verizon and Walgreens Featured...
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Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
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All companies that have data.
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Market metrics

MariaDB is the default database in the LAMP stack supplied by Red Hat and SUSE Linux,...
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As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
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As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
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Licensing and pricing models

MariaDB plc subscriptions cover our free, open source database, Community Server,...
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Milvus was released under the open-source Apache License 2.0 in October 2019. Fully-managed...
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Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
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