DBMS > Fauna vs. FoundationDB vs. Milvus vs. Snowflake vs. Tkrzw

System Properties Comparison Fauna vs. FoundationDB vs. Milvus vs. Snowflake vs. Tkrzw

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market. As a consequence, the product was removed from the DB-Engines ranking. In April 2018, Apple open-sourced FoundationDB and it therefore reappears in the ranking.

Description

Fauna provides a web-native interface, with support for GraphQL and custom business logic that integrates seamlessly with the rest of the serverless ecosystem. The underlying globally distributed storage and compute platform is fast, consistent, and reliable, with a modern security infrastructure.

Ordered key-value store. Core features are complimented by layers.

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

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

A concept of libraries, allowing an application program to store and query key-value pairs in a file. Successor of Tokyo Cabinet and Kyoto Cabinet

Primary database model

Document store
Graph DBMS
Relational DBMS
Time Series DBMS

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

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

Score	1.55
Rank	#151	Overall
	#26	Document stores
	#14	Graph DBMS
	#71	Relational DBMS
	#13	Time Series DBMS

Score	1.06
Rank	#185	Overall
	#31	Document stores
	#28	Key-value stores
	#85	Relational DBMS

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	0.07
Rank	#372	Overall
	#57	Key-value stores

Website

fauna.com

github.com/apple/foundationdb

milvus.io

www.snowflake.com

dbmx.net/tkrzw

Technical documentation

docs.fauna.com

apple.github.io/foundationdb

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Fauna, Inc.

FoundationDB

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Mikio Hirabayashi

Initial release

2014

2013

2019

2014

2020

Current release

6.2.28, November 2020

2.3.4, January 2024

0.9.3, August 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

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

Scala

C++

C++, Go

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

hosted

Linux
macOS

Data scheme

schema-free

some layers support schemas

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

some layers support typing

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

SQL

Support of SQL

supported in specific SQL layer only

yes

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C#
Go
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby
Scala
Swift

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++
Java
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

in SQL-layer only

user defined functions

Triggers

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

horizontal partitioning

consistent hashing

Sharding

yes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

yes

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Linearizable consistency

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

in SQL-layer only

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

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

using specific database classes

User concepts

Access control

Identity management, authentication, and access control

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

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...
» more

Competitive advantages

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
» more

Typical application scenarios

RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
» more

Key customers

Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
» more

Market metrics

As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Milvus was released under the open-source Apache License 2.0 in October 2019. Fully-managed...
» more

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.