Milvus vs. Redis
Compare Milvus vs. Redis by the following set of capabilities. We want you to choose the best database for you, even if it’s not us.
Milvus vs. Redis on Scalability
No. Redis primarily operates by keeping data in memory. The classic architecture of Redis does not inherently follow the storage-compute separation architecture. Instead, it tightly couples data storage and computation in the same node or instance to ensure data access performance.
Yes. At the component level (which provides more fine-grained scalability).
No. It only scales at the server level. In addition, you need to reshard all the data when scaling out a Redis cluster.
Yes - built-in replication; HA provided in an additional layer by Reis Cluster or Redis Sentinel)
Dynamic segment placement
With Redis Enteprise
Milvus scalability
Regarding scalability, Milvus uses worker nodes for each type of action (components to handle connections, data nodes to handle ingestion, index nodes to index, and query nodes to search). Each node has its own assigned CPU and memory resources. Milvus can dynamically allocate new nodes to an action group, speeding up operations or reducing the number of nodes, thus freeing resources for other actions. Dynamically allocating nodes allows for easier scaling and resource planning and guarantees latency and throughput.
Redis Scalability
High Availabiltiy can be achieved with Redis Enterprise.
Milvus vs. Redis on Functionality
Performance is the biggest challenge with vector databases as the number of unstructured data elements stored in a vector database grows into hundreds of millions or billions, and horizontal scaling across multiple nodes becomes paramount.
Furthermore, differences in insert rate, query rate, and underlying hardware may result in different application needs, making overall system tunability a mandatory feature for vector databases.
Yes (DiskANN)
Yes. Sparse & Dense Vectors and Scalar filtering.
Yes - Pre-filtering documents against an index containing searchable fields
HNSW & IVFFlat
Milvus functionality
- Milvus supports multiple in-memory indexes and table-level partitions results in the high performance required for real-time information retrieval systems.
- RBAC support is a requirement for enterprise-grade applications.
- In regards to partitions, by limiting searches to one or several subsets of the database, partitions can provide a more efficient way to filter data compared to static sharding, which can introduce bottlenecks and require re-sharding as data grows beyond server capacity. Partitions are a great way to manage your data by grouping it into subsets based on categories or time ranges. This can help you to easily filter and search through large amounts of data, without having to search through the entire database every time.
- No single Index type can fit all use cases since each use case will have different tradeoffs With more index types supported, you have more flexibility to find the balance between accuracy, performance and cost.
Redis
Redis has supprt for similarity queries search with the use of vector fields; It is important to note that the k default LIMIT is 10.
Milvus vs. Redis on Purpose-built
What’s your vector database for?
A vector database is a fully managed solution for storing, indexing, and searching across a massive dataset of unstructured data that leverages the power of embeddings from machine learning models. A vector database should have the following features:
- Scalability and tunability
- Multi-tenancy and data isolation
- A complete suite of APIs
- An intuitive user interface/administrative console
Milvus vs. Redis: what’s right for me?
Milvus
Milvus is a fully open source and independent project, maintained by a number of companies and individuals, some of whom also offer commercial services and support. Graduate of LF AI Data. License: Apache-2.0 license
Redis is an in-memory data structure store used as a database, cache, message broker, and streaming engine that has a vector field type for the storage, querying and indexing of vectors.
License: BSD License
