DBMS > Milvus vs. MySQL vs. Neo4j vs. Oracle NoSQL

System Properties Comparison Milvus vs. MySQL vs. Neo4j vs. Oracle NoSQL

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Widely used open source RDBMS

Scalable, ACID-compliant graph database designed with a high-performance distributed cluster architecture, available in self-hosted and cloud offerings

A multi-model, scalable, distributed NoSQL database, designed to provide highly reliable, flexible, and available data management across a configurable set of storage nodes

Primary database model

Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Graph DBMS

Document store
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	1.81
Rank	#144	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Score	1087.72
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	44.47
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	2.96
Rank	#103	Overall
	#18	Document stores
	#17	Key-value stores
	#52	Relational DBMS

Website

milvus.io

www.mysql.com

neo4j.com

www.oracle.com/database/nosql/technologies/nosql

Technical documentation

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

dev.mysql.com/doc

neo4j.com/docs

docs.oracle.com/en/database/other-databases/nosql-database/index.html

Developer

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Neo4j, Inc.

Oracle

Initial release

2019

1995

2007

2011

Current release

2.3.4, January 2024

8.3.0, January 2024

5.19, April 2024

23.3, December 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

Proprietary for Enterprise Edition (Oracle Database EE license has Oracle NoSQL database EE covered: details)

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

Aiven for MySQL: Fully managed MySQL, deployable in the cloud of your choice, with seamless integrations and lightning-fast setup.

Neo4j Aura: Neo4j’s fully managed cloud service: The zero-admin, always-on graph database for cloud developers.

Implementation language

C++, Go

C and C++

Java, Scala

Java

Server operating systems

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux

Can also be used server-less as embedded Java database.
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
Solaris SPARC/x86

Data scheme

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

Support Fixed schema and Schema-less deployment with the ability to interoperate between them.

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

Vector, Numeric and String

yes

optional

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

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

with proprietary extensions

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

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

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

.Net
Clojure
Elixir
Go
Groovy
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

proprietary syntax

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Triggers

yes

via event handler

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

Electable source-replica replication per shard. Support distributed global deployment with Multi-region table feature

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

with Hadoop integration

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Causal and Eventual Consistency configurable in Causal Cluster setup
Immediate Consistency in stand-alone mode

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

depending on configuration

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

Relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

configurable

ACID within a storage node (=shard)

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

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

off heap cache

User concepts

Access control

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

Users, roles and permissions. Pluggable authentication with supported standards (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos)

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...
» more

Neo4j delivers graph technology that has been battle tested for performance and scale...
» more

Competitive advantages

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

Neo4j is the market leader, graph database category creator, and the most widely...
» more

Typical application scenarios

RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
» more

Real-Time Recommendations Master Data Management Identity and Access Management Network...
» more

Key customers

Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
» more

Over 800 commercial customers and over 4300 startups use Neo4j. Flagship customers...
» more

Market metrics

As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
» more

Neo4j boasts the world's largest graph database ecosystem with more than 140 million...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Milvus was released under the open-source Apache License 2.0 in October 2019. Fully-managed...
» more

GPL v3 license that can be used all the places where you might use MySQL. Neo4j Commercial...
» more

News

This Week in Neo4j: Nodes 2024, Data Modelling, Events, Knowledge Graphs and more
27 April 2024

GQL is Here: Your Cypher Queries in a GQL World
26 April 2024

GQL: The ISO Standard for Graphs Has Arrived
25 April 2024

What Is Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)?
24 April 2024

This Week in Neo4j: Google Cloud, Analysis, Knowledge Graph, Relationships and more
20 April 2024

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