DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. GigaSpaces vs. Graph Engine vs. Neo4j vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. GigaSpaces vs. Graph Engine vs. Neo4j vs. Sphinx

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

High performance in-memory data grid platform, powering three products: Smart Cache, Smart ODS (Operational Data Store), Smart Augmented Transactions

A distributed in-memory data processing engine, underpinned by a strongly-typed RAM store and a general distributed computation engine

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

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Document store
Object oriented DBMS

Values are user defined objects

Graph DBMS
Key-value store

Graph DBMS

Search engine

Secondary database models

Graph DBMS
Search engine

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	1.03
Rank	#188	Overall
	#32	Document stores
	#6	Object oriented DBMS

Score	0.67
Rank	#232	Overall
	#21	Graph DBMS
	#34	Key-value stores

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

docs.gigaspaces.com/latest/landing.html

www.graphengine.io/docs/manual

neo4j.com/docs

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Amazon

Gigaspaces Technologies

Microsoft

Neo4j, Inc.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2012

2000

2010

2007

2001

Current release

15.5, September 2020

5.20, May 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

Open Source

Apache Version 2; Commercial licenses available

Open Source

MIT License

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence 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

Java, C++, .Net

.NET and C

Java, Scala

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

.NET

Linux

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

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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.

XML can be used for describing objects metadata

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-99 for query and DML statements

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

GigaSpaces LRMI
Hibernate
JCache
JDBC
JPA
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data

RESTful HTTP API

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C++
Java
Python
Scala

C#
C++
F#
Visual Basic

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

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes, event driven architecture

yes

via event handler

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication

synchronous or asynchronous
Source-replica replication

synchronous or asynchronous

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)

yes

Map-Reduce pattern can be built with XAP task executors

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable: ALL, QUORUM, ANY

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

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

optional: either by committing a write-ahead log (WAL) to the local persistent storage or by dumping the memory to a persistent storage

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

User concepts

Access control

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

Role-based access control

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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