DBMS > 4D vs. Altibase vs. Couchbase vs. Neo4j vs. searchxml

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Altibase vs. Couchbase vs. Neo4j vs. searchxml

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

An enterprise grade, high-performance RDBMS

A distributed document store with integrated cache, a powerful search engine, in-built operational and analytical capabilities, and an embedded mobile database

Scalable, ACID-compliant graph database designed with a high-performance distributed cluster architecture, available in self-hosted and cloud offerings

DBMS for structured and unstructured content wrapped with an application server

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

Graph DBMS

Native XML DBMS
Search engine

Secondary database models

Key-value store

originating from the former Membase product and supporting the Memcached protocol
Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

DB-Engines Ranking measures the popularity of database management systems
Trend Chart

Score	2.58
Rank	#108	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	1.07
Rank	#186	Overall
	#87	Relational DBMS

Score	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	44.46
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#7	Native XML DBMS
	#25	Search engines

Website

www.searchxml.net/category/products

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

github.com/ALTIBASE/Documents/tree/master/Manuals

docs.couchbase.com

neo4j.com/docs

www.searchxml.net/support/handouts

Developer

4D, Inc

Altibase

Couchbase, Inc.

Neo4j, Inc.

informationpartners gmbh

Initial release

1984

1999

2011

2007

2015

Current release

v20, April 2023

v7.3, 2023, August 2023

Server: 7.2, June 2023; Mobile: 3.1, March 2022; Couchbase Capella (DBaaS), June 2023

5.19, April 2024

1.0

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open source edition discontinued with March 2023

Open Source

Business Source License (BSL 1.1); Commercial licenses also available

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Neo4j Aura: Neo4j’s fully managed cloud service: The zero-admin, always-on graph database for cloud developers.

Implementation language

C++

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Java, Scala

C++

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

Can also be used server-less as embedded Java database.
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

schema-free and schema-optional

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

XML support

Some form of processing data in XML format, e.g. support for XML data structures, and/or support for XPath, XQuery or XSLT.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

ANSI SQL-92

SQL++, extends ANSI SQL to JSON for operational, transactional, and analytic use cases

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol

CLI Client
HTTP REST
Kafka Connector
Native language bindings for CRUD, Query, Search and Analytics APIs
Spark Connector
Spring Data

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

RESTful HTTP API
WebDAV
XQuery
XSLT

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

C
C++
Java

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
Clojure
Elixir
Go
Groovy
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C++

most other programming languages supported via APIs

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

stored procedures and stored functions

Functions and timers in JavaScript and UDFs in Java, Python, SQL++

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

yes

on the application server

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

via event handler

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Automatic Sharding

yes using Neo4j Fabric

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

yes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

yes

sychronisation to multiple collections

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Causal and Eventual Consistency configurable in Causal Cluster setup
Immediate Consistency in stand-alone mode

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

ACID

multiple readers, single writer

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

Ephemeral buckets

User concepts

Access control

Users and groups

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

User and Administrator separation with password-based and LDAP integrated Authentication. Role-base access control.

Users, roles and permissions. Pluggable authentication with supported standards (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos)

Domain, group and role-based access control at the document level and for application services

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Neo4j delivers graph technology that has been battle tested for performance and scale...
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Competitive advantages

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Typical application scenarios

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Key customers

Over 800 commercial customers and over 4300 startups use Neo4j. Flagship customers...
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Market metrics

Neo4j boasts the world's largest graph database ecosystem with more than 140 million...
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Licensing and pricing models

GPL v3 license that can be used all the places where you might use MySQL. Neo4j Commercial...
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