DBMS > Lovefield vs. Milvus vs. NSDb vs. RDF4J vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Lovefield vs. Milvus vs. NSDb vs. RDF4J vs. Sphinx

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Embeddable relational database for web apps written in pure JavaScript

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

Scalable, High-performance Time Series DBMS designed for Real-time Analytics on top of Kubernetes

RDF4J is a Java framework for processing RDF data, supporting both memory-based and a disk-based storage.

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

Primary database model

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

Score	0.29
Rank	#293	Overall
	#133	Relational DBMS

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#41	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.69
Rank	#230	Overall
	#9	RDF stores

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

google.github.io/lovefield

Technical documentation

github.com/google/lovefield/blob/master/docs/spec_index.md

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

nsdb.io/Architecture

rdf4j.org/documentation

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Google

Since 2016 officially forked into an Eclipse project, former developer was Aduna Software.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2014

2019

2017

2004

2001

Current release

2.1.12, February 2017

2.3.4, January 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Eclipse Distribution License (EDL), v1.0.

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

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

JavaScript

C++, Go

Java, Scala

Java

C++

Server operating systems

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

tested with Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux
macOS

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

RDF Schemas

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

yes: int, bigint, decimal, 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.

Secondary indexes

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

via JavaScript builder pattern

SQL-like query language

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

gRPC
HTTP REST
WebSocket

Java API
RIO

RDF Input/Output
Sail API
SeRQL

Sesame RDF Query Language
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

JavaScript

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

Java
Scala

Java
PHP
Python

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Triggers

Using read-only observers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

none

Sharding

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Isolation support depends on the API used

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes, by using IndexedDB or the cloud service Firebase Realtime Database

yes

Using Apache Lucene

yes

in-memory storage is supported as well

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

using MemoryDB

yes

User concepts

Access control

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...
» more

Competitive advantages

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
» more

Typical application scenarios

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

Key customers

Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
» more

Market metrics

As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Milvus was released under the open-source Apache License 2.0 in October 2019. Fully-managed...
» more

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and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.

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More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

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