DBMS > Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Milvus vs. Snowflake vs. TinkerGraph

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Milvus vs. Snowflake vs. TinkerGraph

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

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

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

A lightweight, in-memory graph engine that serves as a reference implementation of the TinkerPop3 API

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

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

Score	5.59
Rank	#63	Overall
	#7	Search engines

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	0.08
Rank	#348	Overall
	#35	Graph DBMS

Website

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

milvus.io

www.snowflake.com

tinkerpop.apache.org/docs/current/reference/#tinkergraph-gremlin

Technical documentation

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

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2015

2019

2014

2009

Current release

2.3.4, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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++, Go

Java

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

hosted

Data scheme

yes

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

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

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

TinkerPop 3

Supported programming languages

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Groovy
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

yes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

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

none

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

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

optional

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

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

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....
» 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...
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