DBMS > Firebird vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. Neo4j vs. OpenSearch

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. Neo4j vs. OpenSearch

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

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

Scalable, ACID-compliant graph database designed with a high-performance distributed cluster architecture, available in self-hosted and cloud offerings

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	21.06
Rank	#31	Overall
	#19	Relational DBMS

Score	829.80
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	1.81
Rank	#144	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Score	44.47
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	15.65
Rank	#38	Overall
	#4	Search engines

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

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

milvus.io

neo4j.com

github.com/opensearch-project
opensearch.org

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

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

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

neo4j.com/docs

opensearch.org/docs/latest

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Microsoft

Neo4j, Inc.

Amazon Web Services

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

1989

2019

2007

2021

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

2.3.4, January 2024

5.19, April 2024

2.5.0, January 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

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

Neo4j Aura: Neo4j’s fully managed cloud service: The zero-admin, always-on graph database for cloud developers.

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++

C++

C++, Go

Java, Scala

Java

Server operating systems

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux
Windows

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux

Can also be used server-less as embedded Java database.
OS X
Solaris
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

Data scheme

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

schema-free

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

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

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

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

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

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

RESTful HTTP API

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

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

.Net
Clojure
Elixir
Go
Groovy
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

Elasticsearch client

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

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

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

yes

Triggers

yes

via event handler

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

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

Sharding

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Causal and Eventual Consistency configurable in Causal Cluster setup
Immediate Consistency in stand-alone mode

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

Relationships in graphs

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

Users, roles and permissions. Pluggable authentication with supported standards (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos)

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Milvus is an open-source and cloud-native vector database built for production-ready...
» more

Neo4j delivers graph technology that has been battle tested for performance and scale...
» more

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

Competitive advantages

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

Neo4j is the market leader, graph database category creator, and the most widely...
» more

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....
» more

Real-Time Recommendations Master Data Management Identity and Access Management Network...
» more

The OpenSearch platform is used across a broad range of search , analytics, and observability...
» more

Key customers

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

Over 800 commercial customers and over 4300 startups use Neo4j. Flagship customers...
» more

Market metrics

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

Neo4j boasts the world's largest graph database ecosystem with more than 140 million...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

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

GPL v3 license that can be used all the places where you might use MySQL. Neo4j Commercial...
» more

The OpenSearch Project offers open source software licensed under Apache License...
» more

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