DBMS > Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. Milvus vs. OpenSearch vs. Spark SQL vs. Stardog

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. Milvus vs. OpenSearch vs. Spark SQL vs. Stardog

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

A distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine forked from Elasticsearch and based on Apache Lucene

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

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

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector 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
	#4	Vector DBMS

Score	16.03
Rank	#37	Overall
	#4	Search engines

Score	18.04
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Score	2.07
Rank	#122	Overall
	#11	Graph DBMS
	#6	RDF stores

Website

azure.microsoft.com/services/synapse-analytics

milvus.io

github.com/opensearch-project
opensearch.org

spark.apache.org/sql

www.stardog.com

Technical documentation

docs.microsoft.com/azure/synapse-analytics

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

opensearch.org/docs/latest

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

docs.stardog.com

Developer

Microsoft

Amazon Web Services

Apache Software Foundation

Stardog-Union

Initial release

2016

2019

2021

2014

2010

Current release

2.4.4, May 2024

2.5.0, January 2023

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

7.3.0, May 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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

Aiven for OpenSearch: Fully managed open source search and analytics suite. Out-of-the-box integrations get you up and running in a couple of clicks.
STACKIT OpenSearch offers OpenSearch in a managed version in enterprise grade, 100% GDPR-compliant, for a wide range of applications like analytics, website search, offering scalability and fast data access.

Implementation language

C++

C++, Go

Java

Scala

Java

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

yes

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support

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.

Import/export of XML data possible

Secondary indexes

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

supports real-time indexing in full-text and geospatial

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

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

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP API

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

JDBC
ODBC

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

C#
Java
PHP

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

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

Elasticsearch client

Java
Python
R
Scala

.Net
Clojure
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Transact SQL

yes

user defined functions and aggregates, HTTP Server extensions in Java

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

via event handlers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

Sharding

yes, utilizing Spark Core

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

none

Multi-source replication in HA-Cluster

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

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

Immediate Consistency in HA-Cluster

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

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

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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OpenSearch is a highly scalable and extensible open-source software suite for search,...
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Competitive advantages

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
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Distributed as fully open source under Apache License, Version 2.0 (ALv2), OpenSearch...
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Typical application scenarios

RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
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The OpenSearch platform is used across a broad range of search , analytics, and observability...
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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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The OpenSearch Project offers open source software licensed under Apache License...
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