DBMS > Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Milvus vs. Solr vs. Sphinx vs. Stardog

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Milvus vs. Solr vs. Sphinx vs. Stardog

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

A widely used distributed, scalable search engine based on Apache Lucene

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Enterprise Knowledge Graph platform and graph DBMS with high availability, high performance reasoning, and virtualization

Primary database model

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Vector DBMS

Search engine

Graph DBMS
RDF store

Secondary database models

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	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	42.91
Rank	#24	Overall
	#3	Search engines

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	2.02
Rank	#123	Overall
	#11	Graph DBMS
	#6	RDF stores

Website

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

Technical documentation

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

solr.apache.org/resources.html

sphinxsearch.com/docs

docs.stardog.com

Developer

Microsoft

Apache Software Foundation

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Stardog-Union

Initial release

2014

2019

2006

2001

2010

Current release

2.3.4, January 2024

9.6.0, April 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

7.3.0, May 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

commercial

60-day fully-featured trial license; 1-year fully-featured non-commercial use license for academics/students

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

C++

Java

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

All OS with a Java VM

runs as a servlet in servlet container (e.g. Tomcat, Jetty is included)

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Dynamic Fields enables on-the-fly addition of new fields

yes

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

Vector, Numeric and String

yes

supports customizable data types and automatic typing

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

Import/export of XML data possible

Secondary indexes

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

full-text index on all search fields

yes

supports real-time indexing in full-text and geospatial

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

Solr Parallel SQL Interface

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

Yes, compatible with all major SQL variants through dedicated BI/SQL Server

APIs and other access methods

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

RESTful HTTP API

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Proprietary protocol

GraphQL query language
HTTP API
Jena RDF API
OWL
RDF4J API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SNARL
SPARQL
Spring Data
Stardog Studio
TinkerPop 3

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
Erlang
Java
JavaScript
any language that supports sockets and either XML or JSON
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

.Net
Clojure
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

JavaScript

Java plugins

user defined functions and aggregates, HTTP Server extensions in Java

Triggers

JavaScript

yes

User configurable commands triggered on index changes

yes

via event handlers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

none

Multi-source replication in HA-Cluster

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

spark-solr: github.com/lucidworks/spark-solr and streaming expressions to reduce

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

Immediate Consistency in HA-Cluster

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

optimistic locking

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

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

yes

Access rights for 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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