DBMS > 4D vs. ClickHouse vs. Google Cloud Datastore vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Neo4j

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. ClickHouse vs. Google Cloud Datastore vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Neo4j

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

A high-performance, column-oriented SQL DBMS for online analytical processing (OLAP) that uses all available system resources to their full potential to process each analytical query as fast as possible. It is available as both an open-source software and a cloud offering.

Automatically scaling NoSQL Database as a Service (DBaaS) on the Google Cloud Platform

A high performance, column-oriented RDBMS, specifically developed to harness the massive parallelism of modern CPU and GPU hardware

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

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.58
Rank	#108	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	16.34
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	4.47
Rank	#76	Overall
	#12	Document stores

Score	1.77
Rank	#141	Overall
	#65	Relational DBMS

Score	44.46
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

clickhouse.com

cloud.google.com/datastore

github.com/heavyai/heavydb
www.heavy.ai

neo4j.com

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

clickhouse.com/docs

cloud.google.com/datastore/docs

docs.heavy.ai

neo4j.com/docs

Developer

4D, Inc

Clickhouse Inc.

Google

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

Neo4j, Inc.

Initial release

1984

2016

2008

2016

2007

Current release

v20, April 2023

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

5.10, January 2022

5.20, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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

DoubleCloud: Fully managed ClickHouse alongside best-in-class managed open-source services to build analytics at scale.
ClickHouse Cloud: Get the performance you love from open source ClickHouse in a serverless offering that takes care of the details so you can spend more time getting insight out of the fastest database on earth.
Aiven for Clickhouse: Managed cloud data warehousing with high-speed analytics.

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

Implementation language

C++

C++ and CUDA

Java, Scala

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

hosted

Linux

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

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes, details here

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

SQL-like query language (GQL)

yes

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

gRPC
HTTP REST
JDBC
MySQL wire protocol
ODBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol
Proprietary protocol

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

3rd party library
C++
Elixir

3rd party library
Go

3rd party library
Java

3rd party library
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party library
Kotlin

3rd party library
Nim

3rd party library
Perl

3rd party library
PHP

3rd party library
Python

3rd party library
R

3rd party library
Ruby

3rd party library
Rust
Scala

3rd party library

.Net
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

using Google App Engine

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Triggers

yes

Callbacks using the Google Apps Engine

yes

via event handler

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

key based and custom

Sharding

Round robin

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

Asynchronous and synchronous physical replication; geographically distributed replicas; support for object storages.

Multi-source replication using Paxos

Multi-source replication

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on type of query and configuration

Strong Consistency is default for entity lookups and queries within an Entity Group (but can instead be made eventually consistent). Other queries are always eventual consistent.

Immediate Consistency

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

via ReferenceProperties or Ancestor paths

yes

Relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Serializable Isolation within Transactions, Read Committed outside of Transactions

ACID

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

User concepts

Access control

Users and groups

Access rights for users and roles. Column and row based policies. Quotas and resource limits. Pluggable authentication with LDAP and Kerberos. Password based, X.509 certificate, and SSH key authentication.

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Neo4j delivers graph technology that has been battle tested for performance and scale...
» more

Competitive advantages

Neo4j is the market leader, graph database category creator, and the most widely...
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Typical application scenarios

Real-Time Recommendations Master Data Management Identity and Access Management Network...
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Key customers

Over 800 commercial customers and over 4300 startups use Neo4j. Flagship customers...
» more

Market metrics

Neo4j boasts the world's largest graph database ecosystem with more than 140 million...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

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

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