DBMS > Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. Milvus vs. OpenSearch vs. Oracle Berkeley DB

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. Milvus vs. OpenSearch vs. Oracle Berkeley DB

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

A distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine forked from Elasticsearch and based on Apache Lucene

Widely used in-process key-value store

Primary database model

supports sorted and unsorted key sets
Native XML DBMS

in the Oracle Berkeley DB XML version

Secondary database models

Vector 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
	#4	Vector DBMS

Score	16.03
Rank	#37	Overall
	#4	Search engines

Score	2.01
Rank	#126	Overall
	#21	Key-value stores
	#3	Native XML DBMS

Website

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

azure.microsoft.com/services/synapse-analytics

milvus.io

github.com/opensearch-project
opensearch.org

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/berkeleydb.html

Technical documentation

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

docs.microsoft.com/azure/synapse-analytics

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

opensearch.org/docs/latest

docs.oracle.com/cd/E17076_05/html/index.html

Developer

Microsoft

Amazon Web Services

Oracle

originally developed by Sleepycat, which was acquired by Oracle

Initial release

2015

2016

2019

2021

1994

Current release

2.4.4, May 2024

2.5.0, January 2023

18.1.40, May 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

commercial license 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

STACKIT OpenSearch offers OpenSearch in a managed version in enterprise grade, 100% GDPR-compliant, for a wide range of applications like analytics, website search, offering scalability and fast data access.
Aiven for OpenSearch: Fully managed open source search and analytics suite. Out-of-the-box integrations get you up and running in a couple of clicks.

Implementation language

C++

C++, Go

Java

C, Java, C++ (depending on the Berkeley DB edition)

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

All OS with a Java VM

AIX
Android
FreeBSD
iOS
Linux
OS X
Solaris
VxWorks
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

schema-free

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

only with the Berkeley DB XML edition

Secondary indexes

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language

yes

SQL interfaced based on SQLite is available

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP API

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

C#
Java
PHP

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

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

Elasticsearch client

.Net

Figaro is a .Net framework assembly that extends Berkeley DB XML into an embeddable database engine for .NET
others

Third-party libraries to manipulate Berkeley DB files are available for many languages
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party binding
Perl
Python
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Transact SQL

yes

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

only for the SQL API

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Source-replica replication

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

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

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

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

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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OpenSearch is a highly scalable and extensible open-source software suite for search,...
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Competitive advantages

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
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Distributed as fully open source under Apache License, Version 2.0 (ALv2), OpenSearch...
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Typical application scenarios

RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
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The OpenSearch platform is used across a broad range of search , analytics, and observability...
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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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The OpenSearch Project offers open source software licensed under Apache License...
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