DBMS > Milvus vs. Oracle vs. QuestDB vs. Snowflake vs. TiDB

System Properties Comparison Milvus vs. Oracle vs. QuestDB vs. Snowflake vs. TiDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Widely used RDBMS

A high performance open source SQL database for time series data

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

TiDB is an open source distributed SQL database that supports Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) workloads. It is MySQL compatible and features horizontal scalability, strong consistency, and high availability.

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
RDF store

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
Spatial DBMS

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
Vector DBMS

since Oracle 23

Relational DBMS

Document store

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

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	1236.29
Rank	#1	Overall
	#1	Relational DBMS

Score	2.52
Rank	#109	Overall
	#9	Time Series DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	4.66
Rank	#70	Overall
	#38	Relational DBMS

Website

milvus.io

www.oracle.com/database

questdb.io

www.snowflake.com

pingcap.com

Technical documentation

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

docs.oracle.com/en/database

questdb.io/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.pingcap.com/tidb/stable

Developer

Oracle

QuestDB Technology Inc

Snowflake Computing Inc.

PingCAP, Inc.

Initial release

2019

1980

2014

2016

Current release

2.3.4, January 2024

23c, September 2023

8.0.0, March 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

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

TiDB Cloud: Fully-managed TiDB Service. Bring everything great about TiDB to the cloud.

Implementation language

C++, Go

C and C++

Java (Zero-GC), C++, Rust

Go, Rust

Server operating systems

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows
z/OS

Linux
macOS
Windows

hosted

Linux

Data scheme

yes

Schemaless in JSON and XML columns

yes

schema-free via InfluxDB Line Protocol

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

Vector, Numeric and String

yes

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 with time-series extensions

yes

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

HTTP REST
InfluxDB Line Protocol (TCP/UDP)
JDBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

GORM
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
SQLAlchemy

Supported programming languages

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

C
C#
C++
Clojure
Cobol
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Fortran
Groovy
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Objective C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Tcl
Visual Basic

PostgreSQL driver
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Rust

over HTTP

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PL/SQL

also stored procedures in Java possible

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

horizontal partitioning (by timestamps)

yes

horizontal partitioning (by key range)

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication with eventual consistency

yes

Using Raft consensus algorithm to ensure data replication with strong consistency among multiple replicas.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

can be realized in PL/SQL

yes

with TiSpark Connector

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

full support since version 6.6

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

isolation level can be parameterized

ACID for single-table writes

ACID

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

Version 12c introduced the new option 'Oracle Database In-Memory'

yes

through memory mapped files

User concepts

Access control

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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

Relational model with native time series support Column-based storage and time partitioned...
» more

TiDB is an advanced open-source, distributed SQL database for modern application...
» more

Competitive advantages

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

High ingestion throughput: peak of 4M rows/sec (TSBS Benchmark) Code optimizations...
» more

- HORIZONTAL SCALING : TiDB grants total transparency into your data workloads without...
» more

Typical application scenarios

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

Financial tick data Industrial IoT Application Metrics Monitoring
» more

TiDB is ideal for transactional applications that require extreme scalability and...
» more

Key customers

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

Banks & Hedge funds, Yahoo, OKX, Airbus, Aquis Exchange, Net App, Cloudera, Airtel,...
» more

Block, Pinterest, Catalyst, Bolt, Flipkart, Capcom, Shopee (E-commerce), JD Cloud...
» more

Market metrics

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

34K+ GitHub stars 5K+ members in TiDB Community Slack 1K+ community contributors...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

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

Open source Apache 2.0 QuestDB Enterprise QuestDB Cloud
» more

TiDB Community : Free open source software (Apache 2.0) TiDB Self-Hosted : Enterprise...
» more

News

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8 May 2024

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6 May 2024

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12 April 2024

Create an ADS-B flight radar with QuestDB and a Raspberry Pi
8 April 2024

Build a temperature IoT sensor with Raspberry Pi Pico & QuestDB
5 April 2024

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and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.