DBMS > Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. Neo4j vs. Spark SQL

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. Neo4j vs. Spark SQL

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Elastic, large scale data warehouse service leveraging the broad eco-system of SQL Server

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

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

Scalable, ACID-compliant graph database designed with a high-performance distributed cluster architecture, available in self-hosted and cloud offerings

Spark SQL is a component on top of 'Spark Core' for structured data processing

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	19.93
Rank	#31	Overall
	#19	Relational DBMS

Score	821.56
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#4	Vector DBMS

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	18.04
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Website

azure.microsoft.com/services/synapse-analytics

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

milvus.io

neo4j.com

spark.apache.org/sql

Technical documentation

docs.microsoft.com/azure/synapse-analytics

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

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

neo4j.com/docs

spark.apache.org/docs/latest/sql-programming-guide.html

Developer

Microsoft

Neo4j, Inc.

Apache Software Foundation

Initial release

2016

1989

2019

2007

2014

Current release

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

2.4.4, May 2024

5.20, May 2024

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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

Neo4j Aura: Neo4j’s fully managed cloud service: The zero-admin, always-on graph database for cloud developers.

Implementation language

C++

C++, Go

Java, Scala

Scala

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
Windows

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux

Can also be used server-less as embedded Java database.
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

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

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

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

RESTful HTTP API

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C#
Java
PHP

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

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

.Net
Clojure
Elixir
Go
Groovy
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java
Python
R
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Transact SQL

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

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Triggers

yes

via event handler

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

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

Sharding

yes using Neo4j Fabric

yes, utilizing Spark Core

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

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

Causal and Eventual Consistency configurable in Causal Cluster setup
Immediate Consistency in stand-alone mode

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/synapse-analytics/sql-data-warehouse/sql-data-warehouse-table-constraints

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

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

Users, roles and permissions. Pluggable authentication with supported standards (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos)

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Milvus is an open-source and cloud-native vector database built for production-ready...
» more

Neo4j delivers graph technology that has been battle tested for performance and scale...
» more

Competitive advantages

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
» more

Neo4j is the market leader, graph database category creator, and the most widely...
» more

Typical application scenarios

RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
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Real-Time Recommendations Master Data Management Identity and Access Management Network...
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Key customers

Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
» more

Over 800 commercial customers and over 4300 startups use Neo4j. Flagship customers...
» more

Market metrics

As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
» more

Neo4j boasts the world's largest graph database ecosystem with more than 140 million...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Milvus was released under the open-source Apache License 2.0 in October 2019. Fully-managed...
» more

GPL v3 license that can be used all the places where you might use MySQL. Neo4j Commercial...
» more

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