DBMS > AlaSQL vs. Couchbase vs. Hazelcast vs. HyperSQL vs. Neo4j

System Properties Comparison AlaSQL vs. Couchbase vs. Hazelcast vs. HyperSQL vs. Neo4j

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

JavaScript DBMS library

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

A widely adopted in-memory data grid

Multithreaded, transactional RDBMS written in Java

also known as HSQLDB

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

Primary database model

Document store
Relational DBMS

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

Document store

JSON support with IMDG 3.12

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

Score	0.46
Rank	#260	Overall
	#40	Document stores
	#121	Relational DBMS

Score	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	5.97
Rank	#57	Overall
	#6	Key-value stores

Score	3.49
Rank	#87	Overall
	#47	Relational DBMS

Score	44.46
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

github.com/AlaSQL/alasql

docs.couchbase.com

hazelcast.org/imdg/docs

hsqldb.org/web/hsqlDocsFrame.html

neo4j.com/docs

Developer

Andrey Gershun & Mathias R. Wulff

Couchbase, Inc.

Hazelcast

Neo4j, Inc.

Initial release

2014

2011

2008

2001

2007

Current release

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

5.3.6, November 2023

2.7.2, June 2023

5.19, April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

MIT-License

Open Source

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

Open Source

Apache Version 2; commercial licenses available

Open Source

based on BSD license

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

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

JavaScript

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Java

Java, Scala

Server operating systems

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

Embedded (into Java applications) and Client-Server operating modes

Linux

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

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

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

the object must implement a serialization strategy

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to SQL99, but no user access control, stored procedures and host language bindings.

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

SQL-like query language

yes

APIs and other access methods

JavaScript API

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

JCache
JPA
Memcached protocol
RESTful HTTP API

HTTP API

JDBC via HTTP
JDBC
ODBC

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

Supported programming languages

JavaScript

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
C#
C++
Clojure
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Scala

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC
Java

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

yes

Event Listeners, Executor Services

Java, SQL

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

Events

yes

via event handler

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

none

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Replicated Map

none

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

none

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency selectable by user

Raft Consensus Algorithm

Immediate Consistency

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

yes

only for local storage and DOM-storage

ACID

one or two-phase-commit; repeatable reads; read commited

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using IndexedDB, SQL.JS or proprietary FileStorage

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

Ephemeral buckets

yes

User concepts

Access control

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

Role-based access control

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...
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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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