DBMS > Firebird vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. Sadas Engine vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Firebird vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. Sadas Engine vs. Snowflake

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

SADAS Engine is a columnar DBMS specifically designed for high performance in data warehouse environments

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#158	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

www.firebirdsql.org

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

milvus.io

www.sadasengine.com

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

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

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

www.sadasengine.com/en/sadas-engine-download-free-trial-and-documentation/#documentation

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Firebird Foundation

Microsoft

SADAS s.r.l.

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

1989

2019

2006

2014

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

2.3.4, January 2024

8.0

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

commercial

free trial version available

commercial

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

C++

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

AIX
Linux
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

yes

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

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

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

JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

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
C
C#
C++
Groovy
Java
PHP
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

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

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

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

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

none

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

Immediate 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

managed by 'Learn by Usage'

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

Access rights for users, groups and roles according to SQL-standard

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.