TiDB vs. KDB.AI

Compare TiDB vs. KDB.AI 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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TiDB vs. KDB.AI on Scalability

TiDBKDB.AI

Separation of storage and compute

❌

Separation of query and insertions

Yes.

Multi-replication

❌

Dynamic segment placement vs. static data sharding

Both

Neither.

Cloud-native

❌

Billion-scale vector support

❌

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.

KDB.AI

KDB.AI is a scalable vector database.

TiDB vs. KDB.AI on Functionality

TiDBKDB.AI

Role-based Access Control (RBAC)

❌

Disk Index support

❌

Yes (qFlat and qHNSW)

Hybrid Search (ie Scalar filtering)

Yes, vector search & SQL search

Yes. Hybrid Sparse & Dense Search

Partitions/namespaces/logical groups

❌

Index type supported

HNSW

Flat, qFlat, IVF, IVFPQ, HNSW, and qHNSW.

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.

KDB.AI

Built by KX, a database provider known for time-series data management, KDB.AI enables developers to bring temporal and semantic context and relevancy to their applications. It supports various search types, including vector similarity search, hybrid sparse and vector search, and Non-Transformed TSS, a similarity search algorithm specific for time series data. It uses Cosine Similarity, Inner Product, and L2 Distance (Euclidean) for similarity metrics.

TiDB vs. KDB.AI on Purpose-built

TiDBKDB.AI

Purpose-built for Vectors

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

Yes.

Tunable consistency

❌

Support for both stream and batch of vector data

❌

Binary Vector support

❌

Multi-language SDK

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.

Python

Database rollback

❌

TiDB vs. KDB.AI: what’s right for me?

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

KDB.AI

KDB.AI is a powerful knowledge-based vector database and search engine that allows you to build scalable, reliable AI applications using real-time data.

Proprietary license