DBMS > Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Milvus vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Milvus vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. Weaviate

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

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

Widely used in-process key-value store

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

Vector DBMS

Key-value store

supports sorted and unsorted key sets
Native XML DBMS

in the Oracle Berkeley DB XML version

Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	29.85
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	1.81
Rank	#144	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Score	2.52
Rank	#114	Overall
	#20	Key-value stores
	#3	Native XML DBMS

Score	1.89
Rank	#138	Overall
	#4	Vector DBMS

Website

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

milvus.io

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

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

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

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

Microsoft

Oracle

originally developed by Sleepycat, which was acquired by Oracle

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2014

2019

1994

2019

Current release

2.3.4, January 2024

18.1.40, May 2020

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

commercial license available

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++, Go

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

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

AIX
Android
FreeBSD
iOS
Linux
OS X
Solaris
VxWorks
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

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

only with the Berkeley DB XML edition

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

SQL interfaced based on SQLite is available

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

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

RESTful HTTP API

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

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

.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

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

JavaScript

Triggers

JavaScript

yes

only for the SQL API

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

none

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

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

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

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

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

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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