DBMS > Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. Milvus vs. ObjectBox vs. Spark SQL vs. VelocityDB

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. Milvus vs. ObjectBox vs. Spark SQL vs. VelocityDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

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

Extremely fast embedded database for small devices, IoT and Mobile

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

A .NET Object Database that can be embedded/distributed and extended to a graph data model (VelocityGraph)

Primary database model

Graph DBMS
Object oriented DBMS

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

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

Score	19.93
Rank	#31	Overall
	#19	Relational DBMS

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	1.29
Rank	#166	Overall
	#5	Object oriented DBMS

Score	18.04
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Score	0.11
Rank	#354	Overall
	#37	Graph DBMS
	#15	Object oriented DBMS

Website

azure.microsoft.com/services/synapse-analytics

Technical documentation

docs.microsoft.com/azure/synapse-analytics

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

docs.objectbox.io

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

velocitydb.com/UserGuide

Developer

Microsoft

ObjectBox Limited

Apache Software Foundation

VelocityDB Inc

Initial release

2016

2019

2017

2014

2011

Current release

2.3.4, January 2024

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

7.x

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Apache License 2.0

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

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

C and C++

Scala

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Android
iOS
Linux
macOS
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Any that supports .NET

Data scheme

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP API

Proprietary native API

JDBC
ODBC

.Net

Supported programming languages

C#
Java
PHP

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

C
C++
Dart
Go
Java
JavaScript

planned (as of Jan 2019)
Kotlin
Python

planned (as of Jan 2019)
Swift

Java
Python
R
Scala

.Net

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Transact SQL

Triggers

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

Sharding

none

yes, utilizing Spark Core

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

online/offline synchronization between client and server

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

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

yes

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

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

yes

Based on Windows Authentication

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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

Competitive advantages

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

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...
» more

News

The on-device Vector Database for Android and Java
29 May 2024

Vector search: making sense of search queries
29 May 2024

Python on-device Vector and Object Database for Local AI
28 May 2024

Evolution of search: traditional vs vector search
23 May 2024

On-device Vector Database for Dart/Flutter
21 May 2024

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.

Related products and services

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More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

Vector databases
2 June 2023, Matthias Gelbmann

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