DBMS > InterSystems IRIS vs. MariaDB vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. Stardog

System Properties Comparison InterSystems IRIS vs. MariaDB vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. Stardog

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A containerised multi-model DBMS, interoperability and analytics data platform with wide capabilities for vertical and horizontal scalability

MySQL application compatible open source RDBMS, enhanced with high availability, security, interoperability and performance capabilities. MariaDB ColumnStore provides a column-oriented storage engine and MariaDB Xpand supports distributed SQL.

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

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

Enterprise Knowledge Graph platform and graph DBMS with high availability, high performance reasoning, and virtualization

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store
Object oriented DBMS
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Graph DBMS
RDF store

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS

with OQGraph storage engine
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	4.05
Rank	#83	Overall
	#14	Document stores
	#10	Key-value stores
	#1	Object oriented DBMS
	#45	Relational DBMS

Score	93.21
Rank	#13	Overall
	#9	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	2.02
Rank	#123	Overall
	#11	Graph DBMS
	#6	RDF stores

Website

www.intersystems.com/products/intersystems-iris

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

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

milvus.io

www.stardog.com

Technical documentation

docs.intersystems.com/irislatest/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

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

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

docs.stardog.com

Developer

InterSystems

MariaDB Corporation Ab (MariaDB Enterprise),
MariaDB Foundation (community MariaDB Server)

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

Microsoft

Stardog-Union

Initial release

2018

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

1989

2019

2010

Current release

2023.3, June 2023

11.3.2, February 2024

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

2.3.4, January 2024

7.3.0, May 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription available

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

commercial

60-day fully-featured trial license; 1-year fully-featured non-commercial use license for academics/students

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 and C++

C++

C++, Go

Java

Server operating systems

AIX
Linux
macOS
Ubuntu
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

Linux
Windows

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

depending on used data model

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

yes

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

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.

yes

Import/export of XML data possible

Secondary indexes

yes

supports real-time indexing in full-text and geospatial

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

Yes, compatible with all major SQL variants through dedicated BI/SQL Server

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

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

RESTful HTTP API

GraphQL query language
HTTP API
Jena RDF API
OWL
RDF4J API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SNARL
SPARQL
Spring Data
Stardog Studio
TinkerPop 3

Supported programming languages

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

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Eiffel
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

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

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

.Net
Clojure
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

PL/SQL compatibility added with version 10.3

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

user defined functions and aggregates, HTTP Server extensions in Java

Triggers

yes

via event handlers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

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

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Multi-source replication in HA-Cluster

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 in HA-Cluster

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

not for in-memory storage engine

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

with MEMORY storage engine

yes

User concepts

Access control

yes

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

Access rights for users and roles

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

InterSystems IRIS is a complete cloud-first data platform which includes a multi-model...
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MariaDB is the most powerful open source relational database – modern SQL and JSON...
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Milvus is an open-source and cloud-native vector database built for production-ready...
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Competitive advantages

MariaDB Servers have many features unavailable in other open source relational databases....
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Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
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Typical application scenarios

Web, SaaS and Cloud operational applications that require high availability, scalability...
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RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
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Key customers

Deutsche Bank, DBS Bank, Nasdaq, Red Hat, ServiceNow, Verizon and Walgreens Featured...
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Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
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Market metrics

MariaDB is the default database in the LAMP stack supplied by Red Hat and SUSE Linux,...
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As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
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Licensing and pricing models

MariaDB plc subscriptions cover our free, open source database, Community Server,...
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Milvus was released under the open-source Apache License 2.0 in October 2019. Fully-managed...
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