DBMS > Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. Milvus vs. TDSQL for MySQL vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. Milvus vs. TDSQL for MySQL vs. Weaviate

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Database as a Service offering with high compatibility to Microsoft SQL Server

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

A high-performance distributed database management system with features such as automatic sharding, intelligent operation and maintenance, elastic scalability without downtime, and enterprise-grade security. It is highly compatible with MySQL.

An AI-native realtime vector database engine that integrates scalable machine learning models.

Primary database model

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	29.04
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	77.99
Rank	#16	Overall
	#11	Relational DBMS

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	0.85
Rank	#205	Overall
	#95	Relational DBMS

Score	1.73
Rank	#143	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Website

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/azure-sql/database

milvus.io

www.tencentcloud.com/products/dcdb

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

www.tencentcloud.com/document/product/1042

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

Microsoft

Tencent

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2014

2010

2019

2013

2019

Current release

V12

2.3.4, January 2024

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

commercial

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate Enterprise

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

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

yes

string, int, float, geo point, date, cross reference, fuzzy references

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

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

all data objects are indexed in a semantic vector space (the Contextionary), all primitive fields are indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

C
C#
C++
Java
PHP
Python
Ruby

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

JavaScript

Transact SQL

yes

Triggers

JavaScript

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Automatic sharding

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes, with always 3 replicas available

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

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

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

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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Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
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Competitive advantages

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
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Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
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Typical application scenarios

RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
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As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
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Key customers

Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
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All companies that have data.
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Market metrics

As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
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As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
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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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Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
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