DBMS > Milvus vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. Snowflake vs. Spark SQL vs. Transbase

System Properties Comparison Milvus vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. Snowflake vs. Spark SQL vs. Transbase

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Widely used in-process key-value store

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

Spark SQL is a component on top of 'Spark Core' for structured data processing

A resource-optimized, high-performance, universally applicable RDBMS

Primary database model

Vector DBMS

Key-value store

supports sorted and unsorted key sets
Native XML DBMS

in the Oracle Berkeley DB XML version

Relational DBMS

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

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	2.21
Rank	#117	Overall
	#20	Key-value stores
	#3	Native XML DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	18.96
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Score	0.11
Rank	#341	Overall
	#150	Relational DBMS

Website

milvus.io

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/berkeleydb.html

www.snowflake.com

spark.apache.org/sql

www.transaction.de/en/products/transbase.html

Technical documentation

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

docs.oracle.com/cd/E17076_05/html/index.html

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

spark.apache.org/docs/latest/sql-programming-guide.html

www.transaction.de/en/products/transbase/features.html

Developer

Oracle

originally developed by Sleepycat, which was acquired by Oracle

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Apache Software Foundation

Transaction Software GmbH

Initial release

2019

1994

2014

1987

Current release

2.3.4, January 2024

18.1.40, May 2020

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

Transbase 8.3, 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

commercial license available

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

free development license

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

Implementation language

C++, Go

C, Java, C++ (depending on the Berkeley DB edition)

Scala

C and C++

Server operating systems

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

AIX
Android
FreeBSD
iOS
Linux
OS X
Solaris
VxWorks
Windows

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

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

only with the Berkeley DB XML edition

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL interfaced based on SQLite is available

yes

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Supported programming languages

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

.Net

Figaro is a .Net framework assembly that extends Berkeley DB XML into an embeddable database engine for .NET
others

Third-party libraries to manipulate Berkeley DB files are available for many languages
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party binding
Perl
Python
Tcl

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Java
Python
R
Scala

C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript
Kotlin
Objective-C
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

yes

Triggers

yes

only for the SQL API

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

yes

yes, utilizing Spark Core

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

yes

none

Source-replica replication

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

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

yes

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

User concepts

Access control

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

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...
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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....
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Key customers

Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
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Market metrics

As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
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Licensing and pricing models

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