Redis vs. TiDB
Compare Redis vs. TiDB by the following set of capabilities. We want you to choose the best database for you, even if it’s not us.
Redis vs. TiDB 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.
No. It only scales at the server level. In addition, you need to reshard all the data when scaling out a Redis cluster.
Yes.
Yes - built-in replication; HA provided in an additional layer by Reis Cluster or Redis Sentinel)
With Redis Enteprise
Both
Redis Scalability
High Availabiltiy can be achieved with Redis Enterprise.
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.
Redis vs. TiDB 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 - Pre-filtering documents against an index containing searchable fields
Yes, vector search & SQL search
HNSW & IVFFlat
HNSW
No. HNSW only
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.
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.
Redis vs. TiDB on Purpose-built
Add on to Redis
No, vector search is an add-on to TiDB Cloud serverless.
No
Python for Vector Search
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.
Redis vs. TiDB: what’s right for me?
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
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
