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DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. Milvus vs. Sphinx vs. SurrealDB

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. Milvus vs. Sphinx vs. SurrealDB

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines
NameElasticsearch  Xexclude from comparisonMilvus  Xexclude from comparisonSphinx  Xexclude from comparisonSurrealDB  Xexclude from comparison
DescriptionA distributed, RESTful modern search and analytics engine based on Apache Lucene infoElasticsearch lets you perform and combine many types of searches such as structured, unstructured, geo, and metricA DBMS designed for efficient storage of vector data and vector similarity searchesOpen source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databasesA fully ACID transactional, developer-friendly, multi-model DBMS
Primary database modelSearch engineVector DBMSSearch engineDocument store
Graph DBMS
Secondary database modelsDocument store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS
DB-Engines Ranking infomeasures the popularity of database management systemsranking trend
Trend Chart
Score135.35
Rank#7  Overall
#1  Search engines
Score2.31
Rank#113  Overall
#3  Vector DBMS
Score5.98
Rank#56  Overall
#5  Search engines
Score0.86
Rank#203  Overall
#34  Document stores
#18  Graph DBMS
Websitewww.elastic.co/­elasticsearchmilvus.iosphinxsearch.comsurrealdb.com
Technical documentationwww.elastic.co/­guide/­en/­elasticsearch/­reference/­current/­index.htmlmilvus.io/­docs/­overview.mdsphinxsearch.com/­docssurrealdb.com/­docs
DeveloperElasticSphinx Technologies Inc.SurrealDB Ltd
Initial release2010201920012022
Current release8.6, January 20232.3.4, January 20243.5.1, February 2023v1.5.0, May 2024
License infoCommercial or Open SourceOpen Source infoElastic LicenseOpen Source infoApache Version 2.0Open Source infoGPL version 2, commercial licence availableOpen Source
Cloud-based only infoOnly available as a cloud servicenononono
DBaaS offerings (sponsored links) infoDatabase as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.
Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus
Implementation languageJavaC++, GoC++Rust
Server operating systemsAll OS with a Java VMLinux
macOS info10.14 or later
Windows infowith WSL 2 enabled
FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows
Linux
macOS
Windows
Data schemeschema-free infoFlexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistentyesschema-free
Typing infopredefined data types such as float or dateyesVector, Numeric and Stringnoyes
XML support infoSome form of processing data in XML format, e.g. support for XML data structures, and/or support for XPath, XQuery or XSLT.nono
Secondary indexesyes infoAll search fields are automatically indexednoyes infofull-text index on all search fields
SQL infoSupport of SQLSQL-like query languagenoSQL-like query language (SphinxQL)SQL-like query language
APIs and other access methodsJava API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API
RESTful HTTP APIProprietary protocolGraphQL
RESTful HTTP API
WebSocket
Supported programming languages.Net
Groovy
Community Contributed Clients
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
C++ infounofficial client library
Java
Perl infounofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby infounofficial client library
Deno
Go
JavaScript (Node.js)
Rust
Server-side scripts infoStored proceduresyesnono
Triggersyes infoby using the 'percolation' featurenono
Partitioning methods infoMethods for storing different data on different nodesShardingShardingSharding infoPartitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported
Replication methods infoMethods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodesyesnone
MapReduce infoOffers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methodsES-Hadoop Connectornonono
Consistency concepts infoMethods to ensure consistency in a distributed systemEventual Consistency infoSynchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, allBounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency
Foreign keys infoReferential integritynonono
Transaction concepts infoSupport to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of datanononoACID
Concurrency infoSupport for concurrent manipulation of datayesyesyesyes
Durability infoSupport for making data persistentyesyesyes infoThe original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.yes
In-memory capabilities infoIs there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.Memcached and Redis integrationyes
User concepts infoAccess controlRole based access control and fine grained access rightsnoyes, based on authentication and database rules
More information provided by the system vendor
ElasticsearchMilvusSphinxSurrealDB
Specific characteristicsMilvus is an open-source and cloud-native vector database built for production-ready...
» more
Competitive advantagesHighly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
» more
Typical application scenariosRAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
» more
Key customersMilvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
» more
Market metricsAs of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations​ ​ 3k+ enterprise...
» more
Licensing and pricing modelsMilvus was released under the open-source Apache License 2.0 in October 2019. Fully-managed...
» more

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More resources
ElasticsearchMilvusSphinxSurrealDB
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