DBMS > Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. MonetDB vs. Solr vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. MonetDB vs. Solr vs. Sphinx

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

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

A relational database management system that stores data in columns

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

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	1.72
Rank	#145	Overall
	#67	Relational DBMS

Score	42.91
Rank	#24	Overall
	#3	Search engines

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

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

Technical documentation

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

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

www.monetdb.org/Documentation

solr.apache.org/resources.html

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Microsoft

MonetDB BV

Apache Software Foundation

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

1989

2019

2004

2006

2001

Current release

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

2.3.4, January 2024

Dec2023 (11.49), December 2023

9.6.0, April 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Mozilla Public License 2.0

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

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

Java

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
Windows

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

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

Data scheme

yes

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

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

yes

supports customizable data types and automatic typing

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

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL 2003 with some extensions

Solr Parallel SQL Interface

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

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

RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
native C library

MAPI library (MonetDB application programming interface)
ODBC

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

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

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

C
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby

.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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

yes, in SQL, C, R

Java plugins

Triggers

yes

User configurable commands triggered on index changes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

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

Sharding

Sharding via remote tables

Sharding

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

none

Source-replica replication available in experimental status

yes

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

optimistic locking

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.

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes

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...
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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...
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