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

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

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

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.

An AI-native realtime vector database engine that integrates scalable machine learning models.

Primary database model

Secondary database models

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	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

Score	1.73
Rank	#143	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Website

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

questdb.io/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.pingcap.com/tidb/stable

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

QuestDB Technology Inc

Snowflake Computing Inc.

PingCAP, Inc.

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2019

2014

2016

2019

Current release

2.3.4, January 2024

8.0.0, March 2024

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate Enterprise

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

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

Vector, Numeric and String

yes

string, int, float, geo point, date, cross reference, fuzzy references

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

all data objects are indexed in a semantic vector space (the Contextionary), all primitive fields are indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL with time-series extensions

yes

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

GORM
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
SQLAlchemy

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

Triggers

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

horizontal partitioning (by timestamps)

yes

horizontal partitioning (by key range)

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication with eventual consistency

yes

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

yes

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

Eventual 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

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

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

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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Relational model with native time series support Column-based storage and time partitioned...
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TiDB is an advanced open-source, distributed SQL database for modern application...
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Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
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Competitive advantages

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
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High ingestion throughput: peak of 4M rows/sec (TSBS Benchmark) Code optimizations...
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- HORIZONTAL SCALING : TiDB grants total transparency into your data workloads without...
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Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
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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...
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As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
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Key customers

Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
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Banks & Hedge funds, Yahoo, OKX, Airbus, Aquis Exchange, Net App, Cloudera, Airtel,...
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Block, Pinterest, Catalyst, Bolt, Flipkart, Capcom, Shopee (E-commerce), JD Cloud...
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All companies that have data.
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Market metrics

As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
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34K+ GitHub stars 5K+ members in TiDB Community Slack 1K+ community contributors...
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As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
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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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Open source Apache 2.0 QuestDB Enterprise QuestDB Cloud
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TiDB Community : Free open source software (Apache 2.0) TiDB Self-Hosted : Enterprise...
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Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
» more

News

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