DBMS > Amazon Aurora vs. Cassandra vs. Neo4j vs. TerminusDB vs. VoltDB

System Properties Comparison Amazon Aurora vs. Cassandra vs. Neo4j vs. TerminusDB vs. VoltDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

MySQL and PostgreSQL compatible cloud service by Amazon

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

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

Scalable Graph Database platform making enterprise data available by exploiting inferred entities and relationships

Distributed In-Memory NewSQL RDBMS

Used for OLTP applications with a high frequency of relatively simple transactions, that can hold all their data in memory

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Document store
RDF store

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

Score	7.57
Rank	#51	Overall
	#32	Relational DBMS

Score	98.83
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	0.23
Rank	#316	Overall
	#27	Graph DBMS

Score	1.47
Rank	#157	Overall
	#73	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/CHAP_Aurora.html

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

neo4j.com/docs

terminusdb.github.io/terminusdb/#

docs.voltdb.com

Developer

Amazon

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Neo4j, Inc.

DataChemist Ltd.

VoltDB Inc.

Initial release

2015

2008

2007

2018

2010

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

5.20, May 2024

11.0.0, January 2023

11.3, April 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

GPL V3

Open Source

AGPL for Community Edition, commercial license for Enterprise, AWS, and Pro Editions

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.

Astra DB: Multi-cloud DBaaS built on Apache Cassandra.

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

Implementation language

Java

Java, Scala

Prolog, Rust

Java, C++

Server operating systems

hosted

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

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

Linux

Linux
OS X

for development

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

schema-free and schema-optional

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

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like SELECT, DML and DDL statements (CQL)

SQL-like query language (WOQL)

yes

only a subset of SQL 99

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

CQL (Cassandra Query Language, an SQL-like language)
Thrift

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

OWL
RESTful HTTP API
WOQL (Web Object Query Language)

Java API
JDBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

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

JavaScript
Python

C#
C++
Erlang

not officially supported
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

yes

Java

Triggers

yes

via event handler

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

horizontal partitioning

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Graph Partitioning

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

Journaling Streams

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

FOREIGN KEY constraints are not supported

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID

Transactions are executed single-threaded within stored procedures

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Data access is serialized by the server

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

in-memory journaling

yes

Snapshots and command logging

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

Access rights for users can be defined per object

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

Role-based access control

Users and roles with access to stored procedures

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
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Neo4j delivers graph technology that has been battle tested for performance and scale...
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Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
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Neo4j is the market leader, graph database category creator, and the most widely...
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Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
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Real-Time Recommendations Master Data Management Identity and Access Management Network...
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Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
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Over 800 commercial customers and over 4300 startups use Neo4j. Flagship customers...
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Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
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Neo4j boasts the world's largest graph database ecosystem with more than 140 million...
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Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
» more

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

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