DBMS > FileMaker vs. Firebird vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus

System Properties Comparison FileMaker vs. Firebird vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

FileMaker is a cross-platform RDBMS that includes a GUI frontend.

Firebird is an open source RDBMS forked from Borland's InterBase

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

If a column is of type dynamic docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/scalar-data-types/dynamic then it's possible to add arbitrary JSON documents in this cell
Event Store

this is the general usage pattern at Microsoft. Billing, Logs, Telemetry events are stored in ADX and the state of an individual entity is defined by the arg_max(timestamps)
Spatial DBMS
Search engine

support for complex search expressions docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/parseoperator FTS, Geospatial docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/geo-point-to-geohash-function distributed search -> ADX acts as a distributed search engine
Time Series DBMS

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer/time-series-analysis

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	48.20
Rank	#20	Overall
	#14	Relational DBMS

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Website

www.claris.com/filemaker

www.firebirdsql.org

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

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

milvus.io

Technical documentation

www.claris.com/resources/documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer

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

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

Developer

Claris

a subsidiary of Apple

Firebird Foundation

Microsoft

Initial release

1983

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2019

1989

2019

Current release

19.4.1, November 2021

5.0.0, January 2024

cloud service with continuous releases

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

2.3.4, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

restricted free version is available

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

C and C++

C++

C++, Go

Server operating systems

iOS

client part only
Linux
OS X
Windows

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

hosted

Linux
Windows

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Data scheme

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

bool, datetime, dynamic, guid, int, long, real, string, timespan, double: docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/scalar-data-types

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

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

A http query request can return the data in XML format

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

via plugins

yes

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

APIs and other access methods

Filemaker WebDirect
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

Microsoft SQL Server communication protocol (MS-TDS)
RESTful HTTP API

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

RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

PHP

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PowerShell
Python
R

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

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

PSQL

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

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

Triggers

yes

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/management/updatepolicy

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

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

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication, warm standby

since Version 14

Source-replica replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service. Replication either local, cross-facility or geo-redundant.

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Spark connector (open source): github.com/Azure/azure-kusto-spark

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

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

Features a multi-generational MVCC architecture, readers do not block writers

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

User concepts

Access control

simple rights management via user accounts and connection to external directory services

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

Azure Active Directory Authentication

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...
» more

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....
» 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...
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