DBMS > Alibaba Cloud PolarDB vs. Elasticsearch vs. Neo4j vs. OrientDB vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Alibaba Cloud PolarDB vs. Elasticsearch vs. Neo4j vs. OrientDB vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A cloud-native relational database compatible with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle. Designed for business critical applications.

A distributed, RESTful modern search and analytics engine based on Apache Lucene

Elasticsearch lets you perform and combine many types of searches such as structured, unstructured, geo, and metric

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

Multi-model DBMS (Document, Graph, Key/Value)

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Graph DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

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

Score	0.59
Rank	#241	Overall
	#110	Relational DBMS

Score	135.35
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	44.46
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	3.19
Rank	#93	Overall
	#16	Document stores
	#7	Graph DBMS
	#14	Key-value stores

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

www.alibabacloud.com/product/polardb

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

neo4j.com

orientdb.org

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/polardb/product-overview

www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/index.html

neo4j.com/docs

www.orientdb.com/docs/last/index.html

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Alibaba

Elastic

Neo4j, Inc.

OrientDB LTD; CallidusCloud; SAP

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2010

2007

2010

2014

Current release

8.6, January 2023

5.19, April 2024

3.2.29, March 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Elastic License

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

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

Java

Java, Scala

Java

Server operating systems

hosted

All OS with a Java VM

Linux

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

All OS with a Java JDK (>= JDK 6)

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

schema-free and schema-optional

schema-free

Schema can be enforced for whole record ("schema-full") or for some fields only ("schema-hybrid")

yes

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

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

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language

SQL-like query language, no joins

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

Tinkerpop technology stack with Blueprints, Gremlin, Pipes
Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Java
Python

.Net
Groovy
Community Contributed Clients
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Java, Javascript

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

via event handler

Hooks

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Sharding

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

Multi-source replication

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

could be achieved with distributed queries

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

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

relationship in graphs

yes

Transaction concepts

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

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

Memcached and Redis integration

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

Access rights for users and roles; record level security configurable

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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Competitive advantages

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Typical application scenarios

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Key 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

Specification and pricing. You can use either of the following billing methods to...
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GPL v3 license that can be used all the places where you might use MySQL. Neo4j Commercial...
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News

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