DBMS > Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. Milvus vs. OpenMLDB vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. Milvus vs. OpenMLDB vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Elastic, large scale data warehouse service leveraging the broad eco-system of SQL Server

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

An open-source machine learning database that provides a feature platform for training and inference

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	5.52
Rank	#59	Overall
	#6	Search engines

Score	19.93
Rank	#31	Overall
	#19	Relational DBMS

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	0.10
Rank	#359	Overall
	#36	Time Series DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

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

azure.microsoft.com/services/synapse-analytics

milvus.io

openmldb.ai

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

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

docs.microsoft.com/azure/synapse-analytics

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

openmldb.ai/docs/zh/main

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Microsoft

4 Paradigm Inc.

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2015

2016

2019

2020

2014

Current release

2.3.4, January 2024

2024-2 February 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

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.

Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Implementation language

C++

C++, Go

C++, Java, Scala

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux

hosted

Data scheme

yes

Fixed schema

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

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

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
SQLAlchemy

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

C#
Java
PHP

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

C++
Go
Java
Python
Scala

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Transact SQL

user defined functions

Triggers

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Source-replica replication

yes

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

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/synapse-analytics/sql-data-warehouse/sql-data-warehouse-table-constraints

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

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

yes

using Azure authentication

yes

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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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