DBMS > Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. Tarantool vs. TerarkDB

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. Tarantool vs. TerarkDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

In-memory computing platform with a flexible data schema for efficiently building high-performance applications

A key-value store forked from RocksDB with advanced compression algorithms. It can be used standalone or as a storage engine for MySQL and MongoDB

Primary database model

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Document store
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Key-value store

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Spatial DBMS

with Tarantool/GIS extension

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

Score	5.52
Rank	#59	Overall
	#6	Search engines

Score	821.56
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#4	Vector DBMS

Score	1.67
Rank	#143	Overall
	#25	Document stores
	#25	Key-value stores
	#65	Relational DBMS

Score	0.08
Rank	#367	Overall
	#56	Key-value stores

Website

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

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

milvus.io

www.tarantool.io

github.com/bytedance/terarkdb

Technical documentation

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

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

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

www.tarantool.io/en/doc

bytedance.larkoffice.com/docs/doccnZmYFqHBm06BbvYgjsHHcKc

Developer

Microsoft

ByteDance, originally Terark

Initial release

2015

1989

2019

2008

2016

Current release

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

2.4.4, May 2024

2.10.0, May 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

BSD-2, source-available extensions (modules), commercial licenses for Tarantool Enterprise

commercial

restricted open source version available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Implementation language

C++

C++, Go

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
Windows

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

BSD
Linux
macOS

Data scheme

yes

Flexible data schema: relational definition for tables with ability to store json-like documents in columns

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

string, double, decimal, uuid, integer, blob, boolean, datetime

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

Full-featured ANSI SQL support

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

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

RESTful HTTP API

Open binary protocol

C++ API
Java API

Supported programming languages

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
C#
C++
Erlang
Go
Java
JavaScript
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Rust

C++
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

Lua, C and SQL stored procedures

Triggers

yes

yes, before/after data modification events, on replication events, client session events

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

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

Sharding

Sharding, partitioned with virtual buckets by user defined affinity key. Live resharding for scale up and scale down without maintenance downtime.

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Asynchronous replication with multi-master option
Configurable replication topology (full-mesh, chain, star)
Synchronous quorum replication (with Raft)

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

Casual consistency across sharding partitions
Eventual consistency within replicaset partition

when using asyncronous replication
Immediate Consistency within single instance
Sequential consistency including linearizable read within replicaset partition

when using Raft

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

ACID, with serializable isolation and linearizable read (within partition); Configurable MVCC (within partition); No cross-shard distributed transactions

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, cooperative multitasking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, write ahead logging

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

yes, full featured in-memory storage engine with persistence

yes

User concepts

Access control

yes

using Azure authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

Access Control Lists
Mutual TLS authentication for Tarantol Enterprise
Password based authentication
Role-based access control (RBAC) and LDAP for Tarantol Enterprise
Users and Roles

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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