DBMS > Milvus vs. RDF4J vs. SwayDB vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Milvus vs. RDF4J vs. SwayDB vs. TimescaleDB

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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.

An embeddable, non-blocking, type-safe key-value store for single or multiple disks and in-memory storage

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Relational DBMS

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

Score	3.01
Rank	#89	Overall
	#4	Vector DBMS

Score	0.72
Rank	#222	Overall
	#9	RDF stores

Score	0.00
Rank	#384	Overall
	#60	Key-value stores

Score	4.06
Rank	#73	Overall
	#5	Time Series DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

rdf4j.org/documentation

docs.timescale.com

Developer

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

Simer Plaha

Timescale

Initial release

2019

2004

2018

2017

Current release

2.4.4, May 2024

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Eclipse Distribution License (EDL), v1.0.

Open Source

GNU Affero GPL V3.0

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

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

Scala

Server operating systems

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

RDF Schemas

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

Vector, Numeric and String

yes

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

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

Java
PHP
Python

Java
Kotlin
Scala

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

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

Atomic execution of operations

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

in-memory storage is supported as well

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

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

Competitive advantages

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

Typical application scenarios

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

Key customers

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

Market metrics

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

Licensing and pricing models

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

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

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More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

Vector databases
2 June 2023, Matthias Gelbmann

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