DBMS > IRONdb vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Milvus vs. Spark SQL vs. SQLite

System Properties Comparison IRONdb vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Milvus vs. Spark SQL vs. SQLite

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

IRONdb seems to be discontinued. Therefore it is excluded from the DB-Engines Ranking.

Description

A distributed Time Series DBMS with a focus on scalability, fault tolerance and operational simplicity

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

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

Spark SQL is a component on top of 'Spark Core' for structured data processing

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

Primary database model

column oriented

Secondary database models

Document store

If a column is of type dynamic docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/scalar-data-types/dynamic then it's possible to add arbitrary JSON documents in this cell
Event Store

this is the general usage pattern at Microsoft. Billing, Logs, Telemetry events are stored in ADX and the state of an individual entity is defined by the arg_max(timestamps)
Spatial DBMS
Search engine

support for complex search expressions docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/parseoperator FTS, Geospatial docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/geo-point-to-geohash-function distributed search -> ADX acts as a distributed search engine
Time Series DBMS

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer/time-series-analysis

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

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	18.96
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Score	114.32
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Website

www.circonus.com/solutions/time-series-database/

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

milvus.io

spark.apache.org/sql

www.sqlite.org

Technical documentation

docs.circonus.com/irondb/category/getting-started

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

spark.apache.org/docs/latest/sql-programming-guide.html

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

Developer

Circonus LLC.

Microsoft

Apache Software Foundation

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Initial release

2017

2019

2014

2000

Current release

V0.10.20, January 2018

cloud service with continuous releases

2.3.4, January 2024

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

3.45.3 (15 April 2024), April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Public Domain

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++, Go

Scala

Server operating systems

Linux

hosted

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux
OS X
Windows

server-less

Data scheme

schema-free

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

dynamic column types

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

text, numeric, histograms

yes

bool, datetime, dynamic, guid, int, long, real, string, timespan, double: docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/scalar-data-types

Vector, Numeric and String

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language (Circonus Analytics Query Language: CAQL)

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

APIs and other access methods

HTTP API

Microsoft SQL Server communication protocol (MS-TDS)
RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lisp
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Rust
Scala

.Net
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PowerShell
Python
R

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

Java
Python
R
Scala

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes, in Lua

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Triggers

yes

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/management/updatepolicy

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic, metric affinity per node

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

yes, utilizing Spark Core

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

configurable replication factor, datacenter aware

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service. Replication either local, cross-facility or geo-redundant.

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Spark connector (open source): github.com/Azure/azure-kusto-spark

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate consistency per node, eventual consistency across nodes

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable 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

via file-system locks

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

Azure Active Directory Authentication

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

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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