DBMS > Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. NCache

System Properties Comparison Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. NCache

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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

Open-Source and Enterprise in-memory Key-Value Store

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Key-value store

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Search engine

Using distributed Lucene

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

Score	829.80
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	1.81
Rank	#144	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Score	0.98
Rank	#196	Overall
	#29	Key-value stores

Website

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

milvus.io

www.alachisoft.com/ncache

Technical documentation

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

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

www.alachisoft.com/resources/docs

Developer

Microsoft

Alachisoft

Initial release

1989

2019

2005

Current release

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

2.3.4, January 2024

5.3.3, April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Enterprise Edition 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

C#, .NET, .NET Core, Java

Server operating systems

Linux
Windows

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

partial

Supported data types are Lists, Queues, Hashsets, Dictionary and Counter

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query syntax and LINQ for searching the cache. Cache Synchronization with SQL Server using SQL dependency.

APIs and other access methods

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

RESTful HTTP API

IDistributedCache
JCache
LINQ
Proprietary native API

Supported programming languages

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

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

.Net
.Net Core
C#
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

support for stored procedures with SQL-Server CLR

Triggers

yes

Notifications

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

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

Sharding

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

yes, with selectable consistency level

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Strong Eventual Consistency over WAN with Conflict Resolution using Bridge Topology

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

optimistic locking and pessimistic locking

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

Authentication to access the cache via Active Directory/LDAP (possible roles: user, administrator)

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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NCache has been the market leader in .NET Distributed Caching since 2005 . NCache...
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Competitive advantages

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
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NCache is 100% .NET/ .NET Core based which fully supports ASP.NET Core Sessions ,...
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Typical application scenarios

RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
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NCache enables industries like retail, finance, banking IoT, travel, ecommerce, healthcare...
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Key customers

Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
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Bank of America, Citi, Natures Way, Charter Spectrum, Barclays, Henry Schein, GBM,...
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Market metrics

As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
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Market Leader in .NET Distributed Caching since 2005.
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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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NCache Open Source is free on an as-is basis without any support. NCache Enterprise...
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