DBMS > AlaSQL vs. Neo4j vs. Postgres-XL vs. Snowflake vs. SQLite

System Properties Comparison AlaSQL vs. Neo4j vs. Postgres-XL vs. Snowflake vs. SQLite

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

JavaScript DBMS library

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

Based on PostgreSQL enhanced with MPP and write-scale-out cluster features

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

Primary database model

Document store
Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	0.51
Rank	#256	Overall
	#40	Document stores
	#118	Relational DBMS

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	0.53
Rank	#254	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	111.41
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

github.com/AlaSQL/alasql

neo4j.com/docs

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

Developer

Andrey Gershun & Mathias R. Wulff

Neo4j, Inc.

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Initial release

2014

2007

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

2014

2000

Current release

5.20, May 2024

10 R1, October 2018

3.46.0 (23 May 2024), May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

MIT-License

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

Mozilla public license

commercial

Open Source

Public Domain

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.

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

Implementation language

JavaScript

Java, Scala

Server operating systems

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

Linux

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

Linux
macOS

hosted

server-less

Data scheme

schema-free

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

yes

dynamic column types

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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

XML type, but no XML query functionality

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

APIs and other access methods

JavaScript API

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

Supported programming languages

JavaScript

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

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Erlang
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

via event handler

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

yes using Neo4j Fabric

horizontal partitioning

yes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

yes

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

none

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

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

only for local storage and DOM-storage

ACID

MVCC

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

via file-system locks

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

User concepts

Access control

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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

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...
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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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