DBMS > IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. Milvus vs. Redis vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. Milvus vs. Redis vs. Sphinx

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Elastic, large scale data warehouse service leveraging the broad eco-system of SQL Server

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

Popular in-memory data platform used as a cache, message broker, and database that can be deployed on-premises, across clouds, and hybrid environments

Redis focuses on performance so most of its design decisions prioritize high performance and very low latencies.

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

Primary database model

Multiple data types and a rich set of operations, as well as configurable data expiration, eviction and persistence

Search engine

Secondary database models

Document store

with RedisJSON
Graph DBMS

with RedisGraph
Spatial DBMS
Search engine

with RediSearch
Time Series DBMS

with RedisTimeSeries
Vector DBMS

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

Score	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	20.56
Rank	#31	Overall
	#19	Relational DBMS

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	157.80
Rank	#6	Overall
	#1	Key-value stores

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

azure.microsoft.com/services/synapse-analytics

milvus.io

redis.com
redis.io

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

docs.microsoft.com/azure/synapse-analytics

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

docs.redis.com/latest/index.html
redis.io/docs

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Microsoft

Redis project core team, inspired by Salvatore Sanfilippo

Development sponsored by Redis Inc.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2010

2016

2019

2009

2001

Current release

2.3.4, January 2024

7.2.5, May 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

source-available extensions (modules), commercial licenses for Redis Enterprise

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

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

Aiven for Redis: Fully managed in-memory key-value store for all your caching and speedy lookup needs.

Implementation language

Erlang

C++

C++, Go

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

ported and maintained by Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

partial

Supported data types are strings, hashes, lists, sets and sorted sets, bit arrays, hyperloglogs and geospatial indexes

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

with RediSearch module

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

with RediSQL module

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP API

proprietary protocol

RESP - REdis Serialization Protocol

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

C#
Java
PHP

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

C
C#
C++
Clojure
Crystal
D
Dart
Elixir
Erlang
Fancy
Go
Haskell
Haxe
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Pascal
Perl
PHP
Prolog
Pure Data
Python
R
Rebol
Ruby
Rust
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Swift
Tcl
Visual Basic

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

Transact SQL

Lua; Redis Functions coming in Redis 7 (slides and Github)

Triggers

yes

publish/subscribe channels provide some trigger functionality; RedisGears

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

Sharding

Automatic hash-based sharding with support for hash-tags for manual sharding

Sharding

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Multi-source replication

with Redis Enterprise Pack
Source-replica replication

Chained replication is supported

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

through RedisGears

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Causal consistency can be enabled in Active-Active databases
Strong consistency with Redis Raft
Strong eventual consistency with Active-Active

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/synapse-analytics/sql-data-warehouse/sql-data-warehouse-table-constraints

Transaction concepts

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

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

Atomic execution of command blocks and scripts and optimistic locking

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

yes

Data access is serialized by the server

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Configurable mechanisms for persistency via snapshots and/or operations logs

yes

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

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 can be defined per database

yes

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

Access Control Lists (ACLs): redis.io/docs/management/security/acl
LDAP and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) for Redis Enterprise
Mutual TLS authentication: redis.io/docs/management/security/encryption
Password-based authentication

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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Competitive advantages

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
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Typical application scenarios

RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
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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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