DBMS > Milvus vs. QuestDB vs. Snowflake vs. TDSQL for MySQL vs. TiDB

System Properties Comparison Milvus vs. QuestDB vs. Snowflake vs. TDSQL for MySQL vs. TiDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

A high performance open source SQL database for time series data

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

A high-performance distributed database management system with features such as automatic sharding, intelligent operation and maintenance, elastic scalability without downtime, and enterprise-grade security. It is highly compatible with MySQL.

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

Vector DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Relational DBMS

Document store
Spatial 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	2.52
Rank	#109	Overall
	#9	Time Series DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	0.85
Rank	#205	Overall
	#95	Relational DBMS

Score	4.66
Rank	#70	Overall
	#38	Relational DBMS

Website

milvus.io

questdb.io

www.snowflake.com

www.tencentcloud.com/products/dcdb

pingcap.com

Technical documentation

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

questdb.io/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

www.tencentcloud.com/document/product/1042

docs.pingcap.com/tidb/stable

Developer

QuestDB Technology Inc

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Tencent

PingCAP, Inc.

Initial release

2019

2014

2013

2016

Current release

2.3.4, January 2024

8.0.0, March 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

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

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

Go, Rust

Server operating systems

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux
macOS
Windows

hosted

Linux

Data scheme

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

SQL with time-series extensions

yes

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
ODBC

GORM
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
SQLAlchemy

Supported programming languages

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

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

over HTTP

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C
C#
C++
Java
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

user defined functions

yes

Triggers

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

horizontal partitioning (by timestamps)

yes

Automatic sharding

horizontal partitioning (by key range)

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication with eventual consistency

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

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

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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 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

through memory mapped files

User concepts

Access control

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

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

Build your own resource monitor with QuestDB and Grafana
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.