DBMS > LevelDB vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Milvus vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison LevelDB vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Milvus vs. Sphinx

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Embeddable fast key-value storage library that provides an ordered mapping from string keys to string values

Search-as-a-service for web and mobile app development

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

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

Primary database model

Key-value store

Search engine

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Vector DBMS

Search engine

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.25
Rank	#115	Overall
	#19	Key-value stores

Score	5.52
Rank	#59	Overall
	#6	Search engines

Score	27.71
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

github.com/google/leveldb

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/search

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

milvus.io

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

github.com/google/leveldb/blob/main/doc/index.md

learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Google

Microsoft

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2011

2015

2014

2019

2001

Current release

1.23, February 2021

2.3.4, January 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

BSD

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

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

Implementation language

C++

C++, Go

C++

Server operating systems

Illumos
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

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

JSON types

Vector, Numeric and String

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

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

RESTful HTTP API

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

C++
Go
Java

3rd party binding
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party binding
Python

3rd party binding

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

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

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

JavaScript

Triggers

JavaScript

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

Transaction concepts

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

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

with automatic compression on writes

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

yes

using Azure authentication

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

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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