DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Apache Impala vs. IBM Db2 vs. Neo4j vs. Riak KV

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Apache Impala vs. IBM Db2 vs. Neo4j vs. Riak KV

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Hosted, scalable database service by Amazon with the data stored in Amazons cloud

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

Common in IBM host environments, 2 different versions for host and Windows/Linux

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

Distributed, fault tolerant key-value store

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Relational DBMS

Since Version 10.5 support for JSON/BSON documents compatible with MongoDB

Graph DBMS

Key-value store

with links between data sets and object tags for the creation of secondary indexes

Secondary database models

Document store

Document store
RDF store

in Db2 LUW (Linux, Unix, Windows)
Spatial DBMS

with Db2 Spatial Extender

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

Score	74.45
Rank	#17	Overall
	#3	Document stores
	#2	Key-value stores

Score	12.45
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	125.90
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	4.01
Rank	#79	Overall
	#9	Key-value stores

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

impala.apache.org

www.ibm.com/products/db2

neo4j.com

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

www.ibm.com/docs/en/db2

neo4j.com/docs

www.tiot.jp/riak-docs/riak/kv/latest

Developer

Amazon

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

IBM

Neo4j, Inc.

OpenSource, formerly Basho Technologies

Initial release

2012

2013

1983

host version

2007

2009

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

12.1, October 2016

5.20, May 2024

3.2.0, December 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

Open Source

Apache Version 2

commercial

free version is available

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

Apache version 2, commercial enterprise edition

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++

C and C++

Java, Scala

Erlang

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Windows
z/OS

Linux

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

Linux
OS X

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

schema-free

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

restricted

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
JSON style queries

MongoDB compatible
ODBC
XQuery

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

HTTP API
Native Erlang Interface

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

C
C#
C++
Cobol
Delphi
Fortran
Java
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Visual Basic

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

unofficial client library
C#
C++

unofficial client library
Clojure

unofficial client library
Dart

unofficial client library
Erlang
Go

unofficial client library
Groovy

unofficial client library
Haskell

unofficial client library
Java
JavaScript

unofficial client library
Lisp

unofficial client library
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

unofficial client library
Smalltalk

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Erlang

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes

via event handler

yes

pre-commit hooks and post-commit hooks

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

only with Windows/Unix/Linux Version

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

selectable replication factor

yes

with separate tools (MQ, InfoSphere)

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

selectable replication factor

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

yes

query execution via MapReduce

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

Eventual Consistency

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

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

links between data sets can be stored

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

ACID across one or more tables within a single AWS account and region

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.

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users and roles can be defined via the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Access rights for users, groups and roles

based on Apache Sentry and Kerberos

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

yes, using Riak Security

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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