DBMS > Milvus vs. MySQL vs. SurrealDB vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Milvus vs. MySQL vs. SurrealDB vs. TimescaleDB

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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

A fully ACID transactional, developer-friendly, multi-model DBMS

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

Document store
Graph DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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	0.86
Rank	#203	Overall
	#34	Document stores
	#18	Graph DBMS

Score	4.64
Rank	#71	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

dev.mysql.com/doc

surrealdb.com/docs

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

SurrealDB Ltd

Timescale

Initial release

2019

1995

2022

2017

Current release

2.3.4, January 2024

8.4.0, April 2024

v1.5.0, May 2024

2.15.0, May 2024

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

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++

Rust

Server operating systems

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
macOS
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

Vector, Numeric and String

yes

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

with proprietary extensions

SQL-like query language

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

GraphQL
RESTful HTTP API
WebSocket

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

Deno
Go
JavaScript (Node.js)
Rust

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

proprietary syntax

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

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

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

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

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

User concepts

Access control

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

yes, based on authentication and database rules

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...
» 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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