DBMS > Milvus vs. RDF4J vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx vs. VelocityDB

System Properties Comparison Milvus vs. RDF4J vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx vs. VelocityDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

RDF4J is a Java framework for processing RDF data, supporting both memory-based and a disk-based storage.

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

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

A .NET Object Database that can be embedded/distributed and extended to a graph data model (VelocityGraph)

Primary database model

Graph DBMS
Object oriented DBMS

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

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#4	Vector DBMS

Score	0.74
Rank	#222	Overall
	#9	RDF stores

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	0.11
Rank	#354	Overall
	#37	Graph DBMS
	#15	Object oriented DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

rdf4j.org/documentation

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

sphinxsearch.com/docs

velocitydb.com/UserGuide

Developer

Since 2016 officially forked into an Eclipse project, former developer was Aduna Software.

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

VelocityDB Inc

Initial release

2019

2004

2014

2001

2011

Current release

2.4.4, May 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

7.x

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Eclipse Distribution License (EDL), v1.0.

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

commercial

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

Java

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Any that supports .NET

Data scheme

yes

RDF Schemas

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

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

Java API
RIO

RDF Input/Output
Sail API
SeRQL

Sesame RDF Query Language
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

.Net

Supported programming languages

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

Java
PHP
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

.Net

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

yes

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

yes

none

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

Isolation support depends on the API used

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

in-memory storage is supported as well

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

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

Based on Windows Authentication

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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