DBMS > Firebird vs. HBase vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. OpenSearch

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. HBase vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. OpenSearch

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Wide-column store based on Apache Hadoop and on concepts of BigTable

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

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

A distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine forked from Elasticsearch and based on Apache Lucene

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Vector DBMS

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

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	30.50
Rank	#26	Overall
	#2	Wide column stores

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	16.36
Rank	#37	Overall
	#4	Search engines

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

hbase.apache.org

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

milvus.io

github.com/opensearch-project
opensearch.org

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

hbase.apache.org/book.html

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

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

opensearch.org/docs/latest

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Powerset

Microsoft

Amazon Web Services

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2008

1989

2019

2021

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

2.3.4, January 2021

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

2.3.4, January 2024

2.5.0, January 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

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

Aiven for OpenSearch: Fully managed open source search and analytics suite. Out-of-the-box integrations get you up and running in a couple of clicks.

Implementation language

C and C++

Java

C++

C++, Go

Java

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux
Unix
Windows

using Cygwin

Linux
Windows

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

All OS with a Java VM

Data scheme

yes

schema-free, schema definition possible

yes

schema-free

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

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

options to bring your own types, AVRO

yes

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

All search fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

Java API
RESTful HTTP API
Thrift

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

RESTful HTTP API

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C
C#
C++
Groovy
Java
PHP
Python
Scala

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

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

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

Elasticsearch client

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

yes

Coprocessors in Java

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

yes

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

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

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Single row ACID (across millions of columns)

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

Access Control Lists (ACL) for RBAC, integration with Apache Ranger for RBAC & ABAC

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...
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OpenSearch is a highly scalable and extensible open-source software suite for search,...
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Competitive advantages

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
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Distributed as fully open source under Apache License, Version 2.0 (ALv2), OpenSearch...
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Typical application scenarios

RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
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The OpenSearch platform is used across a broad range of search , analytics, and observability...
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Key customers

Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
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Market metrics

As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
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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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The OpenSearch Project offers open source software licensed under Apache License...
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