DB-EnginesInfluxDB: Focus on building software with an easy-to-use serverless, scalable time series platformEnglish
Deutsch
Knowledge Base of Relational and NoSQL Database Management Systemsprovided by solid IT

DBMS > Google Cloud Spanner vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. Milvus vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Spanner vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. Milvus vs. Sphinx

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines
NameGoogle Cloud Spanner  Xexclude from comparisonIBM Cloudant  Xexclude from comparisonMicrosoft Azure Synapse Analytics infopreviously named Azure SQL Data Warehouse  Xexclude from comparisonMilvus  Xexclude from comparisonSphinx  Xexclude from comparison
DescriptionA horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service. It is the externalization of the core Google database that runs the biggest aspects of Google, like Ads and Google Play.Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDBElastic, large scale data warehouse service leveraging the broad eco-system of SQL ServerA DBMS designed for efficient storage of vector data and vector similarity searchesOpen source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases
Primary database modelRelational DBMSDocument storeRelational DBMSVector DBMSSearch engine
DB-Engines Ranking infomeasures the popularity of database management systemsranking trend
Trend Chart
Score2.89
Rank#103  Overall
#52  Relational DBMS
Score2.68
Rank#106  Overall
#20  Document stores
Score20.56
Rank#31  Overall
#19  Relational DBMS
Score2.31
Rank#113  Overall
#3  Vector DBMS
Score5.98
Rank#56  Overall
#5  Search engines
Websitecloud.google.com/­spannerwww.ibm.com/­products/­cloudantazure.microsoft.com/­services/­synapse-analyticsmilvus.iosphinxsearch.com
Technical documentationcloud.google.com/­spanner/­docscloud.ibm.com/­docs/­Cloudantdocs.microsoft.com/­azure/­synapse-analyticsmilvus.io/­docs/­overview.mdsphinxsearch.com/­docs
DeveloperGoogleIBM, Apache Software Foundation infoIBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014MicrosoftSphinx Technologies Inc.
Initial release20172010201620192001
Current release2.3.4, January 20243.5.1, February 2023
License infoCommercial or Open SourcecommercialcommercialcommercialOpen Source infoApache Version 2.0Open Source infoGPL version 2, commercial licence available
Cloud-based only infoOnly available as a cloud serviceyesyesyesnono
DBaaS offerings (sponsored links) infoDatabase as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.
Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus
Implementation languageErlangC++C++, GoC++
Server operating systemshostedhostedhostedLinux
macOS info10.14 or later
Windows infowith WSL 2 enabled
FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows
Data schemeyesschema-freeyesyes
Typing infopredefined data types such as float or dateyesnoyesVector, Numeric and Stringno
XML support infoSome form of processing data in XML format, e.g. support for XML data structures, and/or support for XPath, XQuery or XSLT.nononono
Secondary indexesyesyesyesnoyes infofull-text index on all search fields
SQL infoSupport of SQLyes infoQuery statements complying to ANSI 2011noyesnoSQL-like query language (SphinxQL)
APIs and other access methodsgRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC infoAt present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API
RESTful HTTP/JSON APIADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP APIProprietary protocol
Supported programming languagesGo
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby
C#
Java
PHP
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
C++ infounofficial client library
Java
Perl infounofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby infounofficial client library
Server-side scripts infoStored proceduresnoView functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScriptTransact SQLnono
Triggersnoyesnonono
Partitioning methods infoMethods for storing different data on different nodesShardingShardingSharding, horizontal partitioningShardingSharding infoPartitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported
Replication methods infoMethods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodesMulti-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication
yesnone
MapReduce infoOffers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methodsyes infousing Google Cloud Dataflowyesnonono
Consistency concepts infoMethods to ensure consistency in a distributed systemImmediate ConsistencyEventual ConsistencyImmediate ConsistencyBounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency
Foreign keys infoReferential integrityyes infoby using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integritynono infodocs.microsoft.com/­en-us/­azure/­synapse-analytics/­sql-data-warehouse/­sql-data-warehouse-table-constraintsnono
Transaction concepts infoSupport to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of dataACID infoStrict serializable isolationno infoatomic operations within a document possibleACIDnono
Concurrency infoSupport for concurrent manipulation of datayesyes infoOptimistic lockingyesyesyes
Durability infoSupport for making data persistentyesyesyesyesyes infoThe original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.
In-memory capabilities infoIs there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.nonoyes
User concepts infoAccess controlAccess rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)Access rights for users can be defined per databaseyesRole based access control and fine grained access rightsno
More information provided by the system vendor
Google Cloud SpannerIBM CloudantMicrosoft Azure Synapse Analytics infopreviously named Azure SQL Data WarehouseMilvusSphinx
Specific characteristicsMilvus is an open-source and cloud-native vector database built for production-ready...
» more
Competitive advantagesHighly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
» more
Typical application scenariosRAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
» more
Key customersMilvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
» more
Market metricsAs of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations​ ​ 3k+ enterprise...
» more
Licensing and pricing modelsMilvus 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.

Related products and services

We invite representatives of vendors of related products to contact us for presenting information about their offerings here.

More resources
Google Cloud SpannerIBM CloudantMicrosoft Azure Synapse Analytics infopreviously named Azure SQL Data WarehouseMilvusSphinx
DB-Engines blog posts

Vector databases
2 June 2023, Matthias Gelbmann

show all

The DB-Engines ranking includes now search engines
4 February 2013, Paul Andlinger

show all

Recent citations in the news

Google Improves Cloud Spanner: More Compute and Storage without Price Increase
14 October 2023, InfoQ.com

Google makes its Cloud Spanner database service faster and more cost-efficient
11 October 2023, SiliconANGLE News

Google turns up the heat on AWS, claims Cloud Spanner is half the cost of DynamoDB
11 October 2023, TechCrunch

Google Cloud just fired a major volley at AWS as the cloud wars heat up
12 October 2023, TechRadar

Google Spanner: When Do You Need to Move to It?
11 September 2023, hackernoon.com

provided by Google News

Cloudant Best (and Worst) Practices — Part 1
18 March 2019, IBM

Intro to Enterprise Cloud Storage: How to Set Up a Cloudant Database
1 December 2014, Linux.com

IBM Expands Cloud Database Services with Kubernetes
26 September 2019, EnterpriseAI

IBM Code Engine and IBM Cloudant: Serverless Data and Infrastructure
16 August 2021, IBM

IBM to Purchase Cloudant Database as a service (DBaaS) Provider
22 March 2014, App Developer Magazine

provided by Google News

Migrate Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics to Amazon Redshift using AWS SCT | Amazon Web Services
18 October 2023, AWS Blog

Azure Synapse Analytics: Everything you need to know about Microsoft's cloud analytics platform
24 September 2023, DataScientest

Azure Synapse Runtime for Apache Spark 3.2 End of Support | Azure updates
22 March 2024, Microsoft

Azure Synapse vs. Databricks: Data Platform Comparison 2024
26 March 2024, eWeek

Azure Synapse Link for Cosmos DB: New Analytics Capabilities
10 November 2023, InfoQ.com

provided by Google News

How NVIDIA GPU Acceleration Supercharged Milvus Vector Database
26 March 2024, The New Stack

AI-Powered Search Engine With Milvus Vector Database on Vultr
31 January 2024, SitePoint

Milvus 2.4 Unveils Game-Changing Features for Enhanced Vector Search
20 March 2024, GlobeNewswire

Zilliz Unveils Game-Changing Features for Vector Search
22 March 2024, Datanami

IBM watsonx.data’s integrated vector database: unify, prepare, and deliver your data for AI
9 April 2024, ibm.com

provided by Google News

Switching From Sphinx to MkDocs Documentation — What Did I Gain and Lose
2 February 2024, Towards Data Science

Manticore is a Faster Alternative to Elasticsearch in C++
25 July 2022, hackernoon.com

Perplexity AI: From Its Use To Operation, Everything You Need To Know About Googles Newest Challenger
11 January 2024, Free Press Journal

The Pirate Bay was recently down for over a week due to a DDoS attack
29 October 2019, The Hacker News

Beyond the Concert Hall: 5 Organizations Making a Difference in Classical Music in 2018 | WQXR Editorial
22 December 2018, WQXR Radio

provided by Google News



Share this page

Featured Products

Milvus logo

Vector database designed for GenAI, fully equipped for enterprise implementation.
Try Managed Milvus for Free

SingleStore logo

Database for your real-time AI and Analytics Apps.
Try it today.

Neo4j logo

See for yourself how a graph database can make your life easier.
Use Neo4j online for free.

Datastax Astra logo

Bring all your data to Generative AI applications with vector search enabled by the most scalable
vector database available.
Try for Free

RaimaDB logo

RaimaDB, embedded database for mission-critical applications. When performance, footprint and reliability matters.
Try RaimaDB for free.

Present your product here