DBMS > Milvus vs. SAP Advantage Database Server vs. Snowflake vs. TiDB vs. Vertica

System Properties Comparison Milvus vs. SAP Advantage Database Server vs. Snowflake vs. TiDB vs. Vertica

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

SAP Advantage Database Server seems to be discontinued. Therefore it is excluded from the DB-Engines Ranking.

Description

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

Low-cost RDBMS with access to ISAM and FoxPro data structures

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.

Cloud or off-cloud analytical database and query engine for structured and semi-structured streaming and batch data. Machine learning platform with built-in algorithms, data preparation capabilities, and model evaluation and management via SQL or Python.

Primary database model

Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

Column oriented

Secondary database models

Document store

Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

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

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	4.66
Rank	#70	Overall
	#38	Relational DBMS

Score	10.68
Rank	#43	Overall
	#27	Relational DBMS

Website

milvus.io

www.sap.com/products/advantage-database-server.html

www.snowflake.com

pingcap.com

www.vertica.com

Technical documentation

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.pingcap.com/tidb/stable

vertica.com/documentation

Developer

Sybase, SAP

Snowflake Computing Inc.

PingCAP, Inc.

OpenText

previously Micro Focus and Hewlett Packard

Initial release

2019

1993

2014

2016

2005

Current release

2.3.4, January 2024

8.0.0, March 2024

12.0.3, January 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Limited community edition free

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

on-premises, all major clouds - Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and containers

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

Go, Rust

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux
Windows

hosted

Linux

Data scheme

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

yes

Yes, but also semi-structure/unstructured data storage, and complex hierarchical data (like Parquet) stored and/or queried.

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

No Indexes Required. Different internal optimization strategy, but same functionality included.

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Full 1999 standard plus machine learning, time series and geospatial. Over 650 functions.

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

.NET Client API
ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

GORM
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
SQLAlchemy

ADO.NET
JDBC
Kafka Connector
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API
Spark Connector
vSQL

character-based, interactive, front-end utility

Supported programming languages

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

Delphi
Perl
PHP

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

C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
R

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

yes, PostgreSQL PL/pgSQL, with minor differences

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes, called Custom Alerts

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

yes

horizontal partitioning (by key range)

horizontal partitioning, hierarchical partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

CONFLICT Trigger to resolve replication conflicts
Source-replica replication

yes

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

Multi-source replication

One, or more copies of data replicated across nodes, or object-store used for repository.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

with TiSpark Connector

Bi-directional Spark integration

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

yes

Transaction concepts

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

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

caching of (temporary) tables can be configured

User concepts

Access control

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

Fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard; supports Kerberos, LDAP, Ident and hash

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Milvus is an open-source and cloud-native vector database built for production-ready...
» more

TiDB is an advanced open-source, distributed SQL database for modern application...
» more

Deploy-anywhere database for large-scale analytical deployments. Deploy off-cloud,...
» more

Competitive advantages

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

- HORIZONTAL SCALING : TiDB grants total transparency into your data workloads without...
» more

Fast, scalable, and capable of high concurrency. Separation of compute/storage leverages...
» more

Typical application scenarios

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

TiDB is ideal for transactional applications that require extreme scalability and...
» more

Communication and network analytics, Embedded analytics, Fraud monitoring and Risk...
» more

Key customers

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

Block, Pinterest, Catalyst, Bolt, Flipkart, Capcom, Shopee (E-commerce), JD Cloud...
» more

Abiba Systems, Adform, adMarketplace, AmeriPride, Anritsu, AOL, Avito, Auckland Transport,...
» 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

TiDB Community : Free open source software (Apache 2.0) TiDB Self-Hosted : Enterprise...
» more

Cost-based models and subscription-based models are both available. One license is...
» more

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.