DBMS > MariaDB vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. SQream DB

System Properties Comparison MariaDB vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. SQream DB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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.

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

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

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

a GPU-based, columnar RDBMS for big data analytics workloads

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS

with OQGraph storage engine
Spatial DBMS

Vector DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	93.21
Rank	#13	Overall
	#9	Relational DBMS

Score	5.59
Rank	#63	Overall
	#7	Search engines

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	0.70
Rank	#227	Overall
	#104	Relational DBMS

Website

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

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

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

milvus.io

sqream.com

Technical documentation

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

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

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

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

docs.sqream.com

Developer

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

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

Microsoft

SQream Technologies

Initial release

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

2015

1989

2019

2017

Current release

11.3.2, February 2024

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

2.3.4, January 2024

2022.1.6, December 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription available

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

commercial

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.

STACKIT MariaDB offers MariaDB in a fully managed version in enterprise grade, 100% GDPR-compliant.

SQLServer Flex @ STACKIT offers a managed version of SQL Server with adjustable CPU, RAM, storage amount and speed, in enterprise grade to perfectly match all application requirements. All services are 100% GDPR-compliant.

Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Implementation language

C and C++

C++

C++, Go

C++, CUDA, Haskell, Java, Scala

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

hosted

Linux
Windows

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux

Data scheme

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

yes, ANSI Standard SQL Types

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

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

RESTful HTTP API

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

RESTful HTTP API

.Net
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

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

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

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

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

C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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 in Python

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

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

Sharding

horizontal and vertical partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

none

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes

using Azure authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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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