DBMS > Amazon CloudSearch vs. EXASOL vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Neo4j

System Properties Comparison Amazon CloudSearch vs. EXASOL vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Neo4j

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A hosted search engine service by Amazon with the data stored in Amazons cloud

High-performance, in-memory, MPP database specifically designed for in-memory analytics.

Search-as-a-service for web and mobile app development

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

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

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	1.87
Rank	#140	Overall
	#12	Search engines

Score	2.25
Rank	#120	Overall
	#57	Relational DBMS

Score	5.71
Rank	#64	Overall
	#8	Search engines

Score	829.80
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	44.47
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch

www.exasol.com

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/search

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

neo4j.com

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch

www.exasol.com/resources

learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

neo4j.com/docs

Developer

Amazon

Exasol

Microsoft

Neo4j, Inc.

Initial release

2012

2000

2015

1989

2007

Current release

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

5.19, April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

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

C++

Java, Scala

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
Windows

Linux

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

Data scheme

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

Secondary indexes

yes

all search fields are automatically indexed

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

APIs and other access methods

HTTP API

.Net
JDBC
ODBC
WebSocket

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

Supported programming languages

Java
Lua
Python
R

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Triggers

yes

via event handler

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

yes

automatic partitioning across Amazon Search Instance as required

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

managed transparently by AWS

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Hadoop integration

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

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

authentication via encrypted signatures

Access rights for users, groups and roles according to SQL-standard

yes

using Azure authentication

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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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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