DBMS > Alibaba Cloud PolarDB vs. Neo4j vs. RocksDB vs. Spark SQL

System Properties Comparison Alibaba Cloud PolarDB vs. Neo4j vs. RocksDB vs. Spark SQL

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

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

Embeddable persistent key-value store optimized for fast storage (flash and RAM)

Spark SQL is a component on top of 'Spark Core' for structured data processing

Primary database model

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

Score	0.66
Rank	#235	Overall
	#108	Relational DBMS

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	3.41
Rank	#86	Overall
	#11	Key-value stores

Score	18.04
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Website

www.alibabacloud.com/product/polardb

neo4j.com

rocksdb.org

spark.apache.org/sql

Technical documentation

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

neo4j.com/docs

github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki

spark.apache.org/docs/latest/sql-programming-guide.html

Developer

Alibaba

Neo4j, Inc.

Facebook, Inc.

Apache Software Foundation

Initial release

2007

2013

2014

Current release

5.20, May 2024

9.2.1, May 2024

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

BSD

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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, Scala

C++

Scala

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

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

Linux

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

schema-free

yes

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

C++ API
Java API

JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Java
Python

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

C
C++
Go
Java
Perl
Python
Ruby

Java
Python
R
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Triggers

yes

via event handler

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes using Neo4j Fabric

horizontal partitioning

yes, utilizing Spark Core

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

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

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

ACID

yes

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

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

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

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

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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