DBMS > Ingres vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. Riak KV vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison Ingres vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. Riak KV vs. Weaviate

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Well established RDBMS

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

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

Distributed, fault tolerant key-value store

An AI-native realtime vector database engine that integrates scalable machine learning models.

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Key-value store

with links between data sets and object tags for the creation of secondary indexes

Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	4.11
Rank	#81	Overall
	#44	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	4.10
Rank	#82	Overall
	#9	Key-value stores

Score	1.73
Rank	#143	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Website

www.actian.com/databases/ingres

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

milvus.io

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

docs.actian.com/ingres

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

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

www.tiot.jp/riak-docs/riak/kv/latest

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

Actian Corporation

Microsoft

OpenSource, formerly Basho Technologies

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

1974

originally developed at University Berkely in early 1970s

1989

2019

2009

2019

Current release

11.2, May 2022

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

2.3.4, January 2024

3.2.0, December 2022

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Apache version 2, commercial enterprise edition

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate Enterprise

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

C++

C++, Go

Erlang

Server operating systems

AIX
HP Open VMS
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Windows

Linux
Windows

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux
OS X

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

yes

string, int, float, geo point, date, cross reference, fuzzy references

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.

but tools for importing/exporting data from/to XML-files available

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

restricted

yes

all data objects are indexed in a semantic vector space (the Contextionary), all primitive fields are indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

.NET Client API
JDBC
ODBC
proprietary protocol (OpenAPI)

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

RESTful HTTP API

HTTP API
Native Erlang Interface

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

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

unofficial client library
C#
C++

unofficial client library
Clojure

unofficial client library
Dart

unofficial client library
Erlang
Go

unofficial client library
Groovy

unofficial client library
Haskell

unofficial client library
Java
JavaScript

unofficial client library
Lisp

unofficial client library
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

unofficial client library
Smalltalk

unofficial client library

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

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

Erlang

Triggers

yes

pre-commit hooks and post-commit hooks

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

horizontal partitioning

Ingres Star to access multiple databases simultaneously

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

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Ingres Replicator

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

selectable replication factor

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

links between data sets can be stored

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

MVCC

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

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

yes, using Riak Security

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

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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Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
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Competitive advantages

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
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Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
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Typical application scenarios

RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
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As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
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Key customers

Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
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All companies that have data.
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Market metrics

As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
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As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
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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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Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
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