LanceDB vs. TiDB

Compare LanceDB vs. TiDB by the following set of capabilities. We want you to choose the best database for you, even if it’s not us.

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LanceDB vs. TiDB on Scalability

LanceDBTiDB

Separation of storage and compute

Yes.

❌

Separation of query and insertions

❌

Yes.

Multi-replication

❌

Dynamic segment placement vs. static data sharding

No (static data sharding coming soon)

Both

Cloud-native

❌

Billion-scale vector support

❌

LanceDB

LanceDB is an open-source vector database that's designed to store, manage, query and retrieve embeddings on multi-modal data. LanceDB and its underlying data format, Lance, are built to scale to really large amounts of data (hundreds of terabytes, 200M+ vectors).

TiDB

TiDB is designed with scalability as one of its core features. It offers both horizontal and vertical scaling capabilities to handle growing workloads and data volumes.

LanceDB vs. TiDB on Functionality

LanceDBTiDB

Role-based Access Control (RBAC)

❌

Disk Index support

❌

Hybrid Search (ie Scalar filtering)

Yes, vector search & keyword search

Yes, vector search & SQL search

Partitions/namespaces/logical groups

❌

Index type supported

IVF-PQ, HNSW

(LanceDB adopts a disk-based indexing philosophy.)

HNSW

Multiple in-memory indexes support

❌

No. HNSW only

TiDB

TiDB offers vector search through its serverless cluster and supports vectors with a maximum dimension of 16,000. The Vector data type in TiDB is designed to store single-precision floating-point numbers (Float32). It only supports cosine distance and L2 distance for similarity measurement.

LanceDB vs. TiDB on Purpose-built

LanceDBTiDB

Purpose-built for Vectors

❌

No, vector search is an add-on to TiDB Cloud serverless.

Tunable consistency

❌

Support for both stream and batch of vector data

❌

Binary Vector support

❌

Multi-language SDK

Python, Javascript/Typescript, and Rust

No. TiDB does not provide specific SDKs. Instead, it is designed to be compatible with MySQL, which means TiDB can be used with any language with MySQL client or driver support.

Database rollback

✔️

❌

LanceDB vs. TiDB: what’s right for me?

LanceDB

LanceDB is an open-source vector database that's designed to store, manage, query and retrieve embeddings on multi-modal data. It also provides a SaaS solution called LanceDB Cloud that runs serverless in the cloud.

Apache 2.0

TiDB

TiDB is an open-source distributed SQL database for OLAP and OLTP workloads. It now offers a vector search capability (in public beta) as an add-on to its SaaS solution, TiDB Cloud Serverless.

Apache 2.0