DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Milvus vs. MySQL vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Milvus vs. MySQL 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

Search-as-a-service for web and mobile app development

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

Widely used open source RDBMS

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

Primary database model

Search engine

Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Vector DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	135.35
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	5.59
Rank	#63	Overall
	#7	Search engines

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	1083.74
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	1.73
Rank	#143	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/search

milvus.io

www.mysql.com

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

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

learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

dev.mysql.com/doc

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

Elastic

Microsoft

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2010

2015

2019

1995

2019

Current release

8.6, January 2023

2.3.4, January 2024

8.4.0, April 2024

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate Enterprise

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

Aiven for MySQL: Fully managed MySQL, deployable in the cloud of your choice, with seamless integrations and lightning-fast setup.

Implementation language

Java

C++, Go

C and C++

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

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

yes

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

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

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

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

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

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

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

proprietary syntax

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

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

Immediate 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

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

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

yes

using Azure authentication

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

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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Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
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Competitive advantages

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

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

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

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

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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