DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Datomic vs. Neo4j vs. Postgres-XL vs. RRDtool

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Datomic vs. Neo4j vs. Postgres-XL vs. RRDtool

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

Based on PostgreSQL enhanced with MPP and write-scale-out cluster features

Industry standard data logging and graphing tool for time series data. RRD is an acronym for round-robin database.

The data is stored in a circular buffer, thus the system storage footprint remains constant over time.

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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	0.53
Rank	#254	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Score	1.90
Rank	#132	Overall
	#11	Time Series DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

www.datomic.com

neo4j.com

www.postgres-xl.org

oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

docs.datomic.com

neo4j.com/docs

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/doc

Developer

Amazon

Cognitect

Neo4j, Inc.

Tobias Oetiker

Initial release

2012

2007

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

1999

Current release

1.0.7075, December 2023

5.20, May 2024

10 R1, October 2018

1.8.0, 2022

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

Mozilla public license

Open Source

GPL V2 and FLOSS

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

Implementations in Java (e.g. RRD4J) and C# available

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
macOS

HP-UX
Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Numeric data only

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

XML type, but no XML query functionality

Exporting into and restoring from XML files possible

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

in-process shared library
Pipes

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
C
C++
Delphi
Erlang
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

with librrd library
C#

with a different implementation of RRDTool
Java

with a different implementation of RRDTool
JavaScript (Node.js)

with a different implementation of RRDTool
Lua
Perl
PHP

with a wrapper library
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Transaction Functions

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

By using transaction functions

yes

via event handler

yes

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

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

none

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

none

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

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

MVCC

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

by using the rrdcached daemon

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

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

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)

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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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