Comparisons
OpenSearch vs TiDB

OpenSearch vs. TiDB

Compare OpenSearch 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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OpenSearch vs. TiDB on Scalability

OpenSearchTiDB

Separation of storage and compute

❌

Separation of query and insertions

Yes.

Multi-replication

❌

Dynamic segment placement vs. static data sharding

Both

Cloud-native

❌

Billion-scale vector support

❌

OpenSearch

OpenSearch supports horizontal scaling, cluster management optimizations, and efficient shard allocation, making it suitable for handling large datasets and high query loads effectively.

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.

OpenSearch vs. TiDB on Functionality

OpenSearchTiDB

Role-based Access Control (RBAC)

❌

Disk Index support

❌

Hybrid Search (ie Scalar filtering)

yes, vector search & keyword search & scalar filtered search

Yes, vector search & SQL search

Partitions/namespaces/logical groups

❌

Index type supported

ANN

HNSW

Multiple in-memory indexes support

❌

No. HNSW only

OpenSearch

OpenSearch supports:

Vectors with up to 16,000 dimensions.
Vector generation through external libraries or directly within OpenSearch.
Both binary and dense vectors.
Cosine Similarity, Inner Product, and L2 Distance (Euclidean).
Integration with multiple engines, including NMSLIB, Faiss, and Lucene, to facilitate vector indexing and searching.

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.

OpenSearch vs. TiDB on Purpose-built

OpenSearchTiDB

Purpose-built for Vectors

No. Vector search is an add-on to OpenSearch.

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

Java, Python, JavaScript, Go, and .Net

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

❌

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

OpenSearch

OpenSearch is an open-source software suite for search, analytics, security monitoring, and observability applications. It is not purpose-built for vector storage and search workloads but introduces a vector search plugin to provide this capability. Amazon OpenSearch Service is an AWS-managed service for OpenSearch.

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