DBMS > Milvus vs. MySQL vs. Sphinx vs. Tarantool vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Milvus vs. MySQL vs. Sphinx vs. Tarantool vs. TimescaleDB

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

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

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

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Search engine

Document store
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

Spatial DBMS

with Tarantool/GIS extension

Relational DBMS

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

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	1083.74
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	1.72
Rank	#144	Overall
	#25	Document stores
	#25	Key-value stores
	#66	Relational DBMS

Score	4.64
Rank	#71	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

dev.mysql.com/doc

sphinxsearch.com/docs

www.tarantool.io/en/doc

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Timescale

Initial release

2019

1995

2001

2008

2017

Current release

2.3.4, January 2024

8.4.0, April 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

2.10.0, May 2022

2.13.0, November 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 version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

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

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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.

Implementation language

C++, Go

C and C++

C++

C and C++

Server operating systems

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

BSD
Linux
macOS

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

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

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

Vector, Numeric and String

yes

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

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

with proprietary extensions

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

Full-featured ANSI SQL support

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Proprietary protocol

Open binary protocol

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

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

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

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

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

proprietary syntax

Lua, C and SQL stored procedures

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

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

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

Sharding

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

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

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

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

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Immediate Consistency

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

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

yes

yes, cooperative multitasking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

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

User concepts

Access control

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or 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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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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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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