DBMS > Milvus vs. Snowflake vs. StarRocks vs. XTDB

System Properties Comparison Milvus vs. Snowflake vs. StarRocks vs. XTDB

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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

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

An open source, high-performance columnar analytical database that enables real-time, multi-dimensional, and highly concurrent data analytics

Forked from Apache Doris

A general purpose database with bitemporal SQL and Datalog and graph queries

Primary database model

Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

Document store

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

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	0.93
Rank	#198	Overall
	#93	Relational DBMS

Score	0.18
Rank	#332	Overall
	#46	Document stores

Website

milvus.io

www.snowflake.com

www.starrocks.io

github.com/xtdb/xtdb
www.xtdb.com

Technical documentation

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.starrocks.io/en-us/latest/introduction/StarRocks_intro

www.xtdb.com/docs

Developer

Snowflake Computing Inc.

The Linux Foundation

since Feb 2023

Juxt Ltd.

Initial release

2019

2014

2020

2019

Current release

2.3.4, January 2024

2.5.3, March 2023

1.19, September 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

MIT License

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

C++, Java

Clojure

Server operating systems

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

hosted

Linux

All OS with a Java 8 (and higher) VM
Linux

Data scheme

yes

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

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

Vector, Numeric and String

yes

yes, extensible-data-notation format

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

limited SQL, making use of Apache Calcite

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
MySQL protocol

HTTP REST
JDBC

Supported programming languages

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Java

Clojure
Java

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

yes

horizontal partitioning (by range and hash)

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

yes, each node contains all data

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

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, flexibel persistency by using storage technologies like Apache Kafka, RocksDB or LMDB

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

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

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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