DBMS > Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. Stardog vs. Tarantool vs. TerarkDB

System Properties Comparison Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. Stardog vs. Tarantool vs. TerarkDB

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

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

In-memory computing platform with a flexible data schema for efficiently building high-performance applications

A key-value store forked from RocksDB with advanced compression algorithms. It can be used standalone or as a storage engine for MySQL and MongoDB

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Graph DBMS
RDF store

Document store
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Key-value store

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Spatial DBMS

with Tarantool/GIS extension

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

Score	821.56
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

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

Score	1.67
Rank	#143	Overall
	#25	Document stores
	#25	Key-value stores
	#65	Relational DBMS

Score	0.08
Rank	#367	Overall
	#56	Key-value stores

Website

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

milvus.io

www.stardog.com

www.tarantool.io

github.com/bytedance/terarkdb

Technical documentation

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

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

docs.stardog.com

www.tarantool.io/en/doc

bytedance.larkoffice.com/docs/doccnZmYFqHBm06BbvYgjsHHcKc

Developer

Microsoft

Stardog-Union

ByteDance, originally Terark

Initial release

1989

2019

2010

2008

2016

Current release

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

2.3.4, January 2024

7.3.0, May 2020

2.10.0, May 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

commercial

60-day fully-featured trial license; 1-year fully-featured non-commercial use license for academics/students

Open Source

BSD-2, source-available extensions (modules), commercial licenses for Tarantool Enterprise

commercial

restricted open source version 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.

SQLServer Flex @ STACKIT offers a managed version of SQL Server with adjustable CPU, RAM, storage amount and speed, in enterprise grade to perfectly match all application requirements. All services are 100% GDPR-compliant.

Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Implementation language

C++

C++, Go

Java

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
Windows

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux
macOS
Windows

BSD
Linux
macOS

Data scheme

yes

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support

Flexible data schema: relational definition for tables with ability to store json-like documents in columns

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

yes

string, double, decimal, uuid, integer, blob, boolean, datetime

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

Import/export of XML data possible

Secondary indexes

yes

supports real-time indexing in full-text and geospatial

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

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

Full-featured ANSI SQL support

APIs and other access methods

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

RESTful HTTP API

GraphQL query language
HTTP API
Jena RDF API
OWL
RDF4J API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SNARL
SPARQL
Spring Data
Stardog Studio
TinkerPop 3

Open binary protocol

C++ API
Java 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
Clojure
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby

C
C#
C++
Erlang
Go
Java
JavaScript
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Rust

C++
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

user defined functions and aggregates, HTTP Server extensions in Java

Lua, C and SQL stored procedures

Triggers

yes

via event handlers

yes, before/after data modification events, on replication events, client session events

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

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

Sharding

none

Sharding, partitioned with virtual buckets by user defined affinity key. Live resharding for scale up and scale down without maintenance downtime.

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Multi-source replication in HA-Cluster

Asynchronous replication with multi-master option
Configurable replication topology (full-mesh, chain, star)
Synchronous quorum replication (with Raft)

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 in HA-Cluster

Casual consistency across sharding partitions
Eventual consistency within replicaset partition

when using asyncronous replication
Immediate Consistency within single instance
Sequential consistency including linearizable read within replicaset partition

when using Raft

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

relationships in graphs

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

ACID, with serializable isolation and linearizable read (within partition); Configurable MVCC (within partition); No cross-shard distributed transactions

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, cooperative multitasking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, write ahead logging

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

yes, full featured in-memory storage engine with persistence

yes

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

Access rights for users and roles

Access Control Lists
Mutual TLS authentication for Tarantol Enterprise
Password based authentication
Role-based access control (RBAC) and LDAP for Tarantol Enterprise
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...
» 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

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.