DBMS > HarperDB vs. Milvus vs. Sphinx vs. TimesTen vs. VoltDB

System Properties Comparison HarperDB vs. Milvus vs. Sphinx vs. TimesTen vs. VoltDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Ultra-low latency distributed database with an intuitive REST API supporting NoSQL and SQL (including joins). Deployment of functions and databases simultaneously with a consolidated node-level architecture.

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

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

In-Memory RDBMS compatible to Oracle

Distributed In-Memory NewSQL RDBMS

Used for OLTP applications with a high frequency of relatively simple transactions, that can hold all their data in memory

Primary database model

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

Score	0.60
Rank	#244	Overall
	#38	Document stores

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	1.36
Rank	#161	Overall
	#75	Relational DBMS

Score	1.47
Rank	#157	Overall
	#73	Relational DBMS

Website

www.harperdb.io

milvus.io

sphinxsearch.com

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/timesten.html

www.voltdb.com

Technical documentation

docs.harperdb.io/docs

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

sphinxsearch.com/docs

docs.oracle.com/database/timesten-18.1

docs.voltdb.com

Developer

HarperDB

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Oracle, TimesTen Performance Software, HP

originally founded in HP Labs it was acquired by Oracle in 2005

VoltDB Inc.

Initial release

2017

2019

2001

1998

2010

Current release

3.1, August 2021

2.3.4, January 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

11 Release 2 (11.2.2.8.0)

11.3, April 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free community edition available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

commercial

Open Source

AGPL for Community Edition, commercial license for Enterprise, AWS, and Pro Editions

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

Implementation language

Node.js

C++, Go

C++

Java, C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris SPARC/x86
Windows

Linux
OS X

for development

Data scheme

dynamic schema

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON data types

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like data manipulation statements

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

only a subset of SQL 99

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC
React Hooks
RESTful HTTP/JSON API
WebSocket

RESTful HTTP API

Proprietary protocol

JDBC
ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

Java API
JDBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C#
C++
ColdFusion
D
Dart
Delphi
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lisp
MatLab
Objective C
Perl
PHP
PowerShell
Prolog
Python
R
Ruby
Rust
Scala
Swift

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

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

C
C++
Java
PL/SQL

C#
C++
Erlang

not officially supported
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Custom Functions

since release 3.1

PL/SQL

Java

Triggers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

A table resides as a whole on one (or more) nodes in a cluster

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

none

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

the nodes on which a table resides can be defined

none

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

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 or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

FOREIGN KEY constraints are not supported

Transaction concepts

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

Atomic execution of specific operations

ACID

Transactions are executed single-threaded within stored procedures

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Data access is serialized by the server

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes, using LMDB

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

yes

by means of logfiles and checkpoints

yes

Snapshots and command logging

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users and roles

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users and roles with access to stored procedures

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.

Related products and services

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More resources

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

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