DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Datomic vs. Neo4j vs. OrigoDB vs. Stardog

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Datomic vs. Neo4j vs. OrigoDB vs. Stardog

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Datomic builds on immutable values, supports point-in-time queries and uses 3rd party systems for durability

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

A fully ACID in-memory object graph database

Enterprise Knowledge Graph platform and graph DBMS with high availability, high performance reasoning, and virtualization

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS

Document store
Object oriented DBMS

Graph DBMS
RDF store

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	1.66
Rank	#144	Overall
	#66	Relational DBMS

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	0.06
Rank	#380	Overall
	#50	Document stores
	#18	Object oriented DBMS

Score	2.07
Rank	#122	Overall
	#11	Graph DBMS
	#6	RDF stores

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

Developer

Amazon

Cognitect

Neo4j, Inc.

Robert Friberg et al

Stardog-Union

Initial release

2012

2007

2009

under the name LiveDB

2010

Current release

1.0.7075, December 2023

5.20, May 2024

7.3.0, May 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

commercial

limited edition free

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

commercial

60-day fully-featured trial license; 1-year fully-featured non-commercial use license for academics/students

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, Clojure

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

Linux
Windows

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

User defined using .NET types and collections

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.

can be achieved using .NET

Import/export of XML data possible

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

supports real-time indexing in full-text and geospatial

SQL

Support of SQL

Yes, compatible with all major SQL variants through dedicated BI/SQL Server

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

.NET Client API
HTTP API
LINQ

GraphQL query language
HTTP API
Jena RDF API
OWL
RDF4J API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SNARL
SPARQL
Spring Data
Stardog Studio
TinkerPop 3

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Clojure
Java

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

.Net

.Net
Clojure
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Transaction Functions

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

yes

user defined functions and aggregates, HTTP Server extensions in Java

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

By using transaction functions

yes

via event handler

yes

Domain Events

yes

via event handlers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

But extensive use of caching in the application peers

yes using Neo4j Fabric

horizontal partitioning

client side managed; servers are not synchronized

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

none

But extensive use of caching in the application peers

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication in HA-Cluster

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

Immediate Consistency

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

Immediate Consistency in HA-Cluster

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

depending on model

yes

relationships in graphs

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

using external storage systems (e.g. Cassandra, DynamoDB, PostgreSQL, Couchbase and others)

yes

Write ahead log

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

recommended only for testing and development

yes

User concepts

Access control

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

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

Role based authorization

Access rights for users and roles

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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